Subject: [FANFIC] Pre-IP8 Primer
Date: 25 May 2002 00:06:41 -0700
From: rrc3813@yahoo.com (MKSheppard)
Newsgroups: alt.startrek.vs.starwars



 Here's some background on the different universe of Imperial Phoenix,  
compared to Star Trek Canon:

When I first started writing IP, I didn't imagine that it would stretch 
over several years, and as a result, I never specifically fixed a date 
in Trek Canon as to when IP occured.

I also found out that the Maquis, which I wanted to use, had been wiped 
out by the Dominion during the run of DS9, and DS9 left me unsatisfied 
with it's conclusion.

After thinking a lot about the possibilities of un-fucking the damage  
B&B had done to Trek by setting IP in an alternate ST universe, I 
decided  against major drastic changes such as making most of 
Generations invalid, and I settled on simply fixing the final DS9 story 
arc, as it sets up much of the  story arc for IP, along with giving a 
lot of people in ST a brain transplant to make it more entertaining 
than pathetic.

I present my changes to Canon ST in this small 10kb document,  to save 
me the trouble of bloating IP with a lengthy explanation  of the 
changes. 

(and preventing your eyeballs from falling out from boredom)

I have always felt that the last ep of DS9 was too much  of a "Deus Ex 
Machina" type ending, with the mysto-babble  shit between Dukat and 
Sisko in the Caves of the Pah-Wraiths,  along with the final battle for 
Cardassia Prime, which was really, really compressed when it seems that 
B&B realized  that after all their bullshit, they only had five minutes 
to wrap up the series finale.

In the IP universe (read, the Anti-Brannon Braga/Rick  Berman version) 
what happened was this:

Instead of infecting the founders, Section 31 attacked the  White 
factories instead, completely contaminating them with  the peak of 
Federation bio-engineering technology, a completely  lethal virus that 
killed in seconds, to shut off the flow of White. Section 31 knew that 
eventually, the Dominion would  create Vorta and Jem'Hadar clones that 
were immune to the virus  itself to recover the White Factories, but 
this would take several  months to do so. 

This however, was only one part of the S31 plan. Several months  
earlier, large batches of White had been contaminated with a  different 
kind of disease, one that was airborne, but had a  gestation period of 
several months. When this virus became  active, it caused infected 
Jem'Hadar to suffer bouts of insanity.

The double whammy of the insanity disease and the contaminated  White 
factories caused entire Dominion Armies to collapse from  either 
insanity, or White withdrawal, whole units of Jem-Hadar  going insane 
and killing their Vorta controllers/handlers, and in a few cases, even 
Founders.

To add to the whole mess, Section 31 also had begun a large scale Bio-
War programme using the Bharrkas Plague to simply kill Jem'Hadar 
outright, wiping out entire garrisons overnight by simply firing a few 
modified photon torpedoes from orbit.

Of course, the general public in the Federation wasn't informed of 
this, and even Admiral Sutton who helped supervise the  weaponizing and 
use of the Plague, was kept in dark about  Section 31's other two 
biowar projects concerning the Jem'Hadar.

(I have changed S-31 from an organization that sounds mysterious  to 
one that actually WORKS, and relies on multiple plans to achieve it's 
own ends, rather than one easily foiled plan, and also one  that 
practices good Operational Security)

The Founders then opened up armistice talks, since it was  estimated 
that by the time new variants of Jem'hadar immune  to just ONE of the 
three bioweapons S-31 was employing were fielded, the Dominion would 
have collapsed from internal strife.

The Romulans and Klingons weren't too pleased with this  turn of 
events, and they demanded retribution for all the losses they had taken 
in the Dominion War.

Desperate for a negotiated peace to save their stranglehold  over the 
worlds of the Dominion, a bold move was undertaken  by the Founders.

The Cardassians would be offered to the Allied powers as an  enticement 
to stop the fighting. The hard-line elements in the  Federation quickly 
allied with the Romulans and Klingons in the  Armistice talks, shutting 
out the pacifist faction in the Federation  Council, and the deal was 
quickly completed.

Peace......in exchange for carving up the Cardassian Empire as war 
spoils.

However, the Cardassians didn't exactly like this agreement, and so  
the fighting continued for several more months, as the Klingons and  
Romulans brutally captured world after world, while to the dismay  of 
the Maquis, the Pacifist element regained power, and prevented  the 
Federation from getting it's share. Soon, the only independent 
Cardassian state was in the section that had been allotted to the 
Federation.

As you might have expected, Cardassian resentment at this "stab in  the 
back" by their so-called allies bred huge amounts of resentment.  The 
small Cardassian Hedgemony was created from the sliver of space  
allotted to the Federation (but never taken), along with a few border  
worlds on the new Hedgemony's borders with the now-Klingon and Romulan 
controlled sections of former Cardassian space.

Revenge was foremost on every Cardassian's mind, especially after  
hearing of the brutalization of Cardassians in the borders of the  old 
Empire by the conquerors.

As a result, the Cardassian Hedgemony became the first interstellar  
state to offer refuge to the notorious Orion Pirates, becoming the  
unofficial home for pirate raids into the former Maquis worlds of  the 
DMZ, causing tensions to rise, the colonists' requests for aid  
rebuffed by the Federation Government, which was wary of damaging  
relations with the official Orion Confederation, of which nearly 35% of 
the Federation's trade passed through.

This apparent rebuffing of what the Maquis saw as legitimitate  
greviences with the sham government of the Orion Confederation in  
favor of credits did not sit well with the former Maquis worlds  which 
had contributed so much during the war (in some cases, over twenty 
percent of the pre-war population on some planets  had volunteered for 
the Federation, and in some cases, ten  percent of the planet's 
population had become casualties).

On the various worlds in the former DMZ, voices rose up in  dissent, 
asking "What did we lay down so many of our mothers,  fathers, 
brothers, and sister's lives for?"

Meanwhile, in the Cardassian Hedgemony, a small clique of former  
military officers and current officers were disgusted by their  
government's use of brigands and scoundrels, as were the inhabitants  
of the planets that the Orions based from, which inevitably became  the 
target of Federation/Klingon/Romulan reprisal raids.

On both sides of the old Cardassian/Federation border, small  groups 
met together, and the seed was set for the growing  Indepedence 
movement, while the number of armed attacks on  Federation and 
Hedgemony ships and troops grew almost daily.

It's been a few years since the Dominion War ended, but  the 
aftershocks are still reverberating through the entire  Milky Way 
Galaxy (with the exception of the Delta Quadrant, which  is too far 
away to be affected).

The Romulans and Klingons are rebuilding their fleets to their post-war 
heights, in a massive shipbuilding program that is causing some unease 
in the Federation, since both sides are building battleships the size 
of which the Alpha and Beta Quadrants have never seen before.

Meanwhile, the Federation is slowly rebuilding its fleets, having 
suffered  much less losses in my timeline than in the Braga/Berman one, 
since due to the farsightedness of people like Admiral Sutton, the 
Federation began  a rearmament programme immediately after the USS 
Odyssey's destruction.

Most of the ships built during this re-armament program were destroyed 
in the War, and currently, there is contentious debate amongst the 
Federation Council on what the post-war fleet is to look like.

Some councilmembers want the Prometheus program to be fully funded as a 
counter to the huge ships the Klingons and Romulans are building.

Some want to concentrate on proven designs, such as the Sovereign and  
Defiant, while still others want to fund further research into 
radically new starship and weapons concepts.

In the Gamma Quadrant, the Dominion is brutally and ruthlessly cracking 
down on the various independence movements that sprang up in the brief  
arctic summer brought upon by the temporary collapse of the Dominion's 
armies. 

The Founders have also begun a brutal purge of the higher ranks of the 
Dominion. Not even the Vorta are safe from the wrath of the Founders. 
There are great shakeups occuring right now that the Alpha Quadrant has 
no inkling of, mostly due to the fact that the Founders have shrewdly 
continued a policy of pinprick attacks on Starfleet exploratory vessels 
in the Delta Quadrant, claiming that these attacks are led by rogue 
Jem'Hadar still in the fits of insanity.

This is the politically charged environment of the Post-War Order that  
Imperial Phoenix is set in.

Meanwhile, over in the Delta Quadrant, the exact moment when _Voyager_  
was captured was three weeks before the events chronicled in the  
episode "Equinox, Part One."

PS - Consider the entire Fucking Pah Wraith subplot fucking ERASED.  
Lord of the Rings stuff has no place in Trek, same as Midichlorans have 
no place in Wars. Dukat was a good character, but Braga and Berman  
really screwed him up towards the end. He's MIA in the Dominion War for  
now. Sisko is still on DS9, mightly relieved that the war is over now,  
as you may have guessed from previous chapters of IP. He is also 
happily  married to Kasidy Yates, and they are about to celebrate their 
first  wedding anniversary.

PPS - In IP, James T Kirk died when the Energy Ribbon hit the  
Enterprise-B in Generations. He died the way he wanted  to die - saving 
the Enterprise. 

Picard just met some other guy who was trapped even longer ago in the 
Ribbon than Kirk. This guy helped him defeat Soran,  thereby preserving 
95% of Generation's plot in IP.

*******************************************************************

Anyway, that's my conception of how to fix things up in IP to make it 
entertaining rather than a pro-SW version of "Whack-a-mole," with the 
Feds playing the role of the moles.

Any comments would be appreciated. The Universe of IP isn't set in 
stone, I'm open to what you think of all this.