Michael Drake

Michael William Drake was born in 2322 to John and Samantha Drake aboard the USS Sizemore. The son of two Starfleet officers, Drake spent his early years among the stars, transferring from ship to ship with his parents. Living on six different starships with one or both of his parents by the time he was twelve, while Drake kept on top of his studies, the wandering lifestyle stunted his early social development. Recognizing this, his parents sent Drake, at age thirteen, to boarding school near their family home in Scotland on Earth. There, Drake developed socially and continued to excel academically, particularly in the sciences. While the decision was good for him, Drake missed his parents dearly, something that would impact his own decisions later in life.

In 2341, Drake applied to and was accepted by Starfleet Academy, a career path that made sense given his upbringing. At the Academy, he was known as a bright eyed and idealistic student equally good with both the theoretical aspects of science and the practical aspects of operations and engineering. When he graduated, he accepted a commission as a science officer aboard the USS Montgomery. He was a gifted scientist and caught the eye of his superiors. Consequently, two years later, he was offered and accepted a promotion to Lieutenant J.G. and an assignment on the USS Delphi as Assistant Chief Science Officer.

During his first three years in Starfleet, Drake came across as a driven science officer on the fast track with his career. All that changed in 2347 when, while aboard the Delphi, he met Ensign Allison Eastman, the small ship’s diplomatic advisor. The two fell quickly in love, and three years later, Lieutenant Drake dropped to one knee and proposed to Allison while they were vacationing together on Risa. As it turned out, the reason Eastman had suggested the vacation was so she could tell him a position with promotion had opened up for her on the USS Regal, a diplomatic flagship. Drake told her he didn’t care. He’d go anywhere with her. And so he applied for a transfer to join her. Unfortunately, the Regal wasn’t a science ship, so the only open position he could find was as the ship’s Assistant Chief Operations Officer.

Michael and Allison got married on the USS Regal. Two years later, they gave birth to a son Robert, and three years after that, their daughter Elsie. For Allison, the Regal was the best possible career move she ever could have made, ascending eventually to become the diplomatic Chargé d’Affaires and Second Officer of the vessel, but for Michael, fourteen years came with only the bump to Chief Operations Officer and two promotions to the rank of Commander. Still, the only thing he regretted was that their children were growing up on a starship, and after thinking long and hard about it together, Michael and Allison decided to relocate back to Earth with their children so they could have some semblance of a normal childhood.

Back on Earth, Allison took the obvious next step by leaving Starfleet and accepting a job with the Federation Diplomatic Corps. Michael had to improvise a bit, eventually accepting a job at Starfleet Command as a Regional Operations Coordinator. While the title was good, and it gave him an opportunity to watch his children blossom into young adults, the work was rather mundane for a bright Commander who had breezed through the Academy and was once on the career fast track. After nine years in Operations with Starfleet Command, Michael was itching to get back out among the stars, so, as his kids went off to Starfleet Academy, he applied for the Command Academy.

Michael Drake was a good deal older than most of the other students in the Command Academy, and his time in operations at Starfleet Command gave him a depth of wisdom that made the Command Academy relatively trivial for him. He graduated with his high praise from his instructors, immediately promoted to Captain and assigned command of the Excelsior-class science vessel USS Fermi on account of his prior background as a science officer. For two years, Drake enjoyed charting nebulae, cataloguing star systems, and exploring the unknown beyond the borderlands in the Galactic South.

The Dominion War changed everything for Drake. Soon after the war broke out, he was reassigned to the USS Themis, an Akira-class vessel part of a tactical group with one clear purpose: engage the enemy hard and often. Drake made a name for himself as an effective battle group manager on account of his nine years in operations at Starfleet Command, and he participated in nearly a dozen engagements leading up to the final Battle of Cardassia.

The atrocities of war changed Captain Drake. Before, he was an eager scientist who had sacrificed his career for his family, but by the end of the war, he’d become a warrior who fought to protect his family. While his wife continued with the Federation Diplomatic Corps, his son went into Starfleet JAG, and his daughter went into Starfleet Medical, Captain Drake decided to keep fighting for them and accepted a promotion to Commodore as a Task Group Commanding Officer aboard the USS Pendragon. From the Pendragon, Commodore Drake fought in the C’hakilian War and the Gorn War.

The Gorn War ended in controversy when the general leading the war effort unleashed an aerial bombardment upon the Gorn capital city. This event caused Starfleet to reconsider how it approached military conflicts, leading to the creation of the Tactical Operations Commands for each quadrant. Having been just low enough on the totem pole to not be implicated in the bombardment, but high enough to be considered for the job, Drake was promoted to Chief of Operations for the Beta Quadrant Tactical Operations Command at the rank of Rear Admiral.

By 2381, following a slew of border conflicts, Rear Admiral Drake had grown tired of conflict and longed to be back with his family. For this reason, he made an abrupt shift in his career when he applied to and was accepted for a Deputy Director in Starfleet Science back on Earth. There, he enjoyed a few lighthearted years with his wife and daughter, while his son served as Regional JAG in the Triangle Region. In time though, the bureaucracy of Starfleet began to wane on Drake while his longing to return to the stars grew. For this reason, he retired from Starfleet in 2384 and joined the Federation Diplomatic Corps.

In the Federation Diplomatic Corps, Charge d’Affaires Drake and his wife spent the first two years as diplomats in the Omega Antares Sector. Out there, Drake got to embrace the unknown again in a way he hadn’t since his time aboard the USS Fermi. When operations in the Omega Antares Sector were scaled down in 2386, rather than return home with his wife, it was the calling of the unknown that led him to the Round Table in the Delta Quadrant. Out in the Round Table, there was the potential for first contact with a nearly unlimited number of alien species.

Drake served as an Ambassador-at-Large for the Federation in the Round Table for the better part of two years. When the Borg attacked Starbase 900 and Starfleet ordered the transwarp gate destroyed, Ambassador Drake was on a deep space first contact mission, only to return to find himself stranded with the rest of Task Force 38 and the Delta Exploration Initiative.

Drake sprung into crisis mode at once, helping, as a civilian, to organize the Federation and Starfleet operations in the quadrant. He helped with logistics and pushed for the creation of a governance board of military officers and civilians that would guide their decision-making in the absence of Starfleet Command and the Federation Council. It was through this effort that he became an obvious choice to manage the task force. He had the science background necessary to understand attempts to reconnect with home, the military background to deal with hostile crises that might arise, the diplomatic background to negotiate with neighboring powers, and, as a civilian at the time of appointment, he was an unbiased choice for the position. In November 2388, Drake thus accepted a field commission from the Delta Council for the position of Task Force 38 Commanding Officer with the brevet rank of Admiral.

Drake’s time presiding over Task Force 38 was short, yet pivotal. During his tenure, the Task Force discovered a connection via a cyclical wormhole back to the Beta Quadrant and a means of communication with the Federation in real-time by restarting a portion of the old Hirogen communications network. Nonetheless, when the Gateway reconnected in January 2389, the Fourth Fleet sent a new Task Force Commanding Officer through the wormhole to relieve Drake, and two months later, with the next reconnection of the cyclical wormhole, Admiral Drake returned to Federation space, rejoining the Diplomatic Corps as an ambassador-at-large in the Alpha Quadrant so he could spend more time with his family.

In April 2401, Ambassador Drake was on Sol Station with contemporaries from the civilian government when the Borg assimilation signal started. Working with a small group of officers from the USS Serenity that also happened to be aboard Sol Station at the time, he helped ensure the safety of over a dozen councilors, cabinet officials and foreign dignitaries during that time, and after assisting the investigation in the aftermath, he made the decision to return to the stars once more, accepting a new role as charge d’affaires for the Archanis Diplomatic Mission.