[Italicized text below is not included in the 'in-game' Biography due to a 10,000 character limit. The ship is equipped completely with Agony Phasers and the Agony Phaser Energy Torpedo, which is why I created her - just to use those!]
At the end of a long and profitable career in the Imperial Starfleet, Captain Zarco retired in 2409. He had managed to navigate the perils of attaining Captaincy and surviving until retirement in the Imperial Starfleet, no small feat during a time when the Empire was completely defeated, then later re-established. This was accomplished in two ways. First, Zarco had “inherited” a Tantalus Field, rumored to have been used by the infamous Captain Spock. This device allowed Zarco to clean up any “loose ends” whenever things went wrong. For, ruthless as he had to be, in order to survive in that environment, he always did what he could to avoid needless bloodshed, and secretly saved as many people as he could from various Terran Empire atrocities. The Tantalus Field came in handy to make sure there were no untrustworthy witnesses to such tender mercies. Secondly, he had a reliable, and very patient Vulcan first officer, much like Captain Spock in many ways. This officer would live a far longer lifespan than Zarco, and was willing to wait until Zarco retired, if Zarco promised to recommend him to succeed him in the command, which is exactly what happened. Until that time, the two officers covered and protected each other as much as they could. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, and it and the Tantalus Field kept them both alive, until Captain Zarco decided that he had had enough. At that time, he arranged for Commander Strivak to be promoted to Captain of the I.S.S. BUCCANEER, and he went into retirement.
Zarco had done some pretty ghastly things in his Imperial Starfleet career, and he was the kind of man who could not easily sleep at night, seeing those nightmarish things happening over and over in his head. He decided to try to keep working somehow in his retirement, since during the hectic Imperial Starfleet days, the tasks and crises coming at him one after another had kept him from thinking too heavily about what he had to do, to stay alive.
Soon, an opportunity fell into his lap. The I.S.S. ATLAS, one of the older Imperial Starfleet battlecruisers, had long been serving as a training vessel for Imperial Starfleet cadets. Zarco had served on it himself as a cadet, and had a great knowledge of and love for that ship, since that first posting.
The ATLAS was being refit in orbit around Deneva, once again a thriving colony, after much tragedy. Unfortunately, in the 2260s, the colony was infested with a horde of macroscopic single-cell organisms, that took over the bodies of the colonists, and threatened the very existence of the Empire itself. At the time, the problem was solved by Captain Kirk and the I.S.S. Enterprise, who fixed things by wiping out the entire population by orbital bombardment. Although the initial bombardment only exterminated the colonists, the Enterprise later discovered that ultraviolet light would destroy the creatures, and followed the first bombardment up with a second one of radiation bombs that would produce the desired effects. For many years after this, the planet was a howling wasteland, and uninhabitable due to radiation. About 20 years later, the Empire turned the former colony into a penal colony, using the prisoners to clean up the radiation damage. This was used as a death sentence for thousands of convicts over the next 50 years. But, over time, the planet recovered, and the efforts of all those convicts were not in vain. The colony was repopulated and once again a decent place to live by the early 2400s.
While the colony was being re-terraformed and then rebuilt, Imperial Starfleet had also built a large series of shipyards in orbit, manned by convicts. The terraforming detail was used as a disciplinary tool to exhort the convicts to ever more efforts in ship construction, since being sent down to the planet was a long, slow death sentence. The officers running the shipyards found that this method of discipline was a bit more efficient than the the agony booths, which took the convict out of the worker population for an unacceptable amount of time.
Now something big was up, and no one in High Command would let slip what was going on. But it was clear that they wanted every ship that they could muster for whatever effort would be made. The ATLAS and several other ships needed to be refit in a hurry, and Zarco was a perfect officer for the posting. He knew every inch of that ship, and was second to none in the field of engineering. When he heard about the project, he asked about the posting. He thought it a bit strange, how easily and quickly the request was granted. Nevertheless, he jumped at the opportunity to refit his old ship.
Zarco found that the tight work schedule and pressure to get the project finished was a challenge that did indeed keep his mind off of the past, mostly. About a week before project completion, and racing to keep the deadline that had been set by his ruthless superiors, Zarco got a subspace message from his old comrade, Captain Strivak.
Strivak was involved with a plan by the High Command to go back in time, rid the galaxy of the dreaded Iconians, and protect the core of the Second Terran Empire with temporal shielding. In addition, he had access to some very classified information through his own Vulcan contacts, and had knowledge of which worlds were to be protected by the temporal shielding and which were not. And Strivak had found out that Deneva was not on the list. Why that would be, since there were now a few million colonists with a pretty good economy, not to mention the important shipyards in orbit, they could only guess. The two officers figured that there was probably a revolt brewing on the colony, or perhaps it was some move to “kill many birds with one stone.” Many officers and public officials long suspected of being too soft had recently been transferred there, perhaps including Zarco. They didn’t know what would happen when the timeline was changed to those outside the temporal shielding, but they could only assume the worst. Strivak also knew the scheduled time for the operation, and he knew he couldn’t get to Deneva in time to be of any assistance. Besides, the BUCCANEER would be assigned to protect one of the largest population centers in the Empire with the temporal shielding. Apparently, the High Command plan was to complete the work on the ships in the shipyards, get the ships warped out to a larger world with temporal shielding, and then launch their temporal attack on the Iconians.
Zarco would have to engineer a mutiny in order to save himself, and as many Denevans as he could, before the end of another week! To make matters worse, he had to do it without both Strivak and the Tantalus Field, which Zarco had turned over to Strivak when he retired.
Zarco had a few things going for him though, so he did not quite lose heart. For one thing, he had a burning desire to save as many people as he could, to try to redeem himself for some of the loathsome acts he had been forced to do as an Imperial Starfleet Captain. In addition, he could easily recruit anyone not in on the plan, who was not slated to warp out with the ships as part of their crews at the end of the week, since the plan would likely result in them ceasing to exist as the timeline changed. Without the Tantalus Field, Zarco had to be extremely careful, but by the end of the week, he had identified a cadre of officers who, like himself, were not scheduled to leave the system with the ships when they were completed at the end of the week. He approached several of them, and gave each of them several names to also contact, and in a few days they had a few hundred officers and men committed to attempt the uprising.
The plan was simple - they would mutiny, take over the ATLAS and the three other ships, and get themselves and as many people as they could out and to the protection of temporally shielded worlds. The mutineers and some civilians such as the Governor of Deneva would not be able to go to the protected worlds, though. They would certainly be killed by Imperial Starfleet Command. So, what they did was to mutiny three days before the plan was to go into effect, and immediately blocked communications into and out of the system. They used all the means that they and the colony had to evacuate everyone possible over the next three days and get them to shielded worlds. The starships and the mutineers, plus those civilians at risk of reprisal, traveled at maximum warp to Tholian space, where they engaged a Tholian ship in combat, triggering a rift to the Prime Universe. Once there, they contacted Starfleet Command, and requested Asylum. While this was going on, the evacuated colonists arrived in thousands of ships at exactly the time they were told to warp into temporally shielded areas, right before the operation was to take place, but too late for anyone to know in time that they should call it off. Thus, everyone that they could move off-world was saved. Some hard choices were made, since there was not transport available for everyone. There was also no guarantee that anything bad would happen to those who remained behind, and some chose to do so anyway, and take their chances with the vagaries of a new timeline. It has not been reported what the results of that gamble were for them, so it’s unknown what their fate was. It may be that they all survived, or some did, or none at all did.
When Zarco, the I.S.S. ATLAS, and her sister ships arrived in what we call the Prime Universe, it was at the height of the Iconian War. The war was raging, worlds were burning, and the fleets and infrastructure of all the major galactic governments were being ravaged. In that situation, desperate for ships and crews, the arrival of the defectors was just what was needed. The flotilla served valiantly under careful observation, and were a great help. After the war, Zarco was granted a Captain’s commission in Starfleet, provided that he complete several months of training at Starfleet Academy to “normalize” his officer skill set. There was also much additional scrutiny, including the unprecedented use of a Vulcan mind-meld, when this decision was made. He continues trying to do everything that he can to atone for his past, and in our Universe, the job of a Starfleet Captain provides many opportunities to do so.
ISS ATLAS, one of the few Mirror Universe ships to cross over to our Universe and not get blown to bits in short order.
