Allison Reyes

EARLY YEARS (2346 – 2364)

Allison Reyes was born January 2, 2346, to Commander John Reyes III, a project manager for the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, and Lisa Prescott-Reyes, a civilian contractor in the Advanced Starship Design Bureau. Both her parents stationed at Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards, Allison spent her early years on Mars. Though she did well enough at school, the real value of these years came from her days off when she would convince her parents to let her come to work with them. Up at the Yards, she would watch starships roll off the assembly line, studying their specifications, learning about the difficulties the engineers faced and otherwise just absorbing the whole operation around them. When her father received a promotion that saw the family return to Earth, Allison was sad to go.

Eleven year old Allison Reyes did not adjust well to Earth. Academically, she did just fine, but socially, she was not prepared for the cliques and social norms that came with a large school. She stayed aloof and isolated, more interested in her latest robots and hovercraft than social hierarchies. Her mother, who retired with the family’s return to Earth, tried to address the issue by enrolling Allison in sports programs. The first few attempts, all in traditional sports, flopped. They suffered from the same social pressures as school However, after a couple years, she found a sport that clicked with her: martial arts. Soon she was sparring competitively, and with that came a rigorous pursuit of general fitness. Allison toned away her awkward adolescent fat as she blossomed into a young woman. By sixteen, she found herself fawned over by some of the boys. Allison paid them no heed though. She’d made up her mind she wanted to go to Starfleet Academy. She devoted herself vigorously to her studies and would let nothing get in her way, least of all teenage lust.

A CADET OF MANY INTERESTS (2364 – 2367)

In 2364, Allison Reyes applied to and was accepted into Starfleet Academy. It came as no surprise to anyone. Four consecutive and unbroken generations of the Reyes line had walked the corridors of Starfleet, dating back to John Reyes Sr., her great-great-grandfather, who’d been a member of the admiralty in the middle of the twenty-third century. Starfleet Academy proved just the opportunity Reyes needed to spread her wings and soar. There, she found herself among cadets who shared her passion for learning, developing close friendships that would last for decades to come while pursuing a wide range of studies ranging from science and engineering to intelligence and security.

For Reyes, the hardest challenge she faced as she moved through the Academy was figuring out an area of focus. She wanted to do them all. Her first summer, she interned with the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, a no brainer given her past, and the second summer, she took a research position at the Daystrom Institute. The summer before her last year, she tried something completely different. She took an administrative job with Starfleet Security in a move that might have seemed strange for a gifted engineer. However, her uncanny ability to regard closed doors as open ones led her to insert herself in several stalled investigations, and her deep understanding of technology proved the key to solving the cases. It was a strange mix, but her CO suggested she might want to look at Starfleet Intelligence, which might let her exercise her mixed abilities.

FROM THE DESK TO THE FIELD (2367 – 2372)

Following her graduation from Starfleet Academy, Ensign Reyes did exactly that. After considering several options, she accepted a posting as an alien technology analyst within Starfleet Intelligence’s Technical Analysis Bureau. She spent six months learning the ropes on Earth, and then she shipped off to an outpost along the Cardassian border. While the Federation-Cardassian Armistice of 2367 had ended hostilities a year earlier, Starfleet Intelligence remained skeptical about the Cardassian Union. Reyes was part of a large section devoted to analyzing Cardassian technologies.

Three years into the job, Reyes had become restless behind a desk. She wanted to do something more with herself. Having read many exciting reports from the field during her time as an intelligence analyst, she applied for a field certification. Although many analysts struggled with the transition, Reyes took to them naturally. She’d scored highly in security, tactical and intelligence at the Academy, and she’d maintained her fitness through her continued pursuit of martial arts. Consequently, later that year, she was field qualified, and she spent the next couple years operating along the Demilitarized Zone. During this time, she was involved with investigations against Xepolite traders brokering arms between Federation sympathizers and Maquis rebels.

While working around the Demilitarized Zone, Reyes had her first run-in with the Dominion. In 2372, as rumors ran amok that the Detepa Council had been replaced by Dominion infiltrators, Reyes was attached to a Defiant-class vessel operating near the Badlands when they were attacked by two Jem’Hadar ships. Surprised and outgunned, the small escort took a heavy beating. It would have been destroyed if not for some quick thinking that took them into the Badlands, where they lost their attackers among turbulent plasma storms. While only a brief encounter, it made a lasting impression with Reyes. It got her asking about how she could get in on the fight with the Dominion, even though, at the time, it was acknowledged as nothing more than a cold war. Soon after she started looking, the Special Operations Bureau came calling. They needed someone with a deep technical knowledge, who already had intelligence clearance, and who could hold her own in combat. Reyes fit the bill.

DARK MEASURES FOR A DARK ERA (2373 – 2375)

With the seizure of Deep Space 9 toward the end of 2373, Lieutenant J.G. Reyes was assigned to a Covert Operations Unit led by a Commander Frank DeVoe, and, for the first time in her career, she started questioning whether she’d made the right choice. Starfleet had entered its darkest hour, and the team she’d been attached to seemed bred for that darkness. DeVoe and his team had operated for years behind enemy lines in the Gamma Quadrant in the leadup to the Dominion War. They were stone-cold shooters, infiltrators and interrogators. They would cross lines no sane human would even consider crossing. At first, it made her hair stand on end; however, over time, she came to realize that these operators had an unflinching and unwavering sense of honor, loyalty and duty, and that they were simply doing the dirty job someone had to do to preserve the Federation.

Reyes remained with the team until the end of the war. They went undercover on Betazed to sabotage Dominion security equipment after the system fell in the Battle of Betazed; they raided a Cardassian research facility to obtain information about their orbital defense systems before the First Battle of Chin’toka; they attempted to capture a Breen ship to analyze its energy dampening weapon, although the mission ended in failure and the team almost got slaughtered; and finally, in the preparation for the Battle of Cardassia, they deployed to Cardassia to support the Cardassian Liberation Front.

When the war ended, so too did Reyes’ time with the Starfleet Intelligence Special Operations Bureau. Though she believed they’d done what needed to be done, she couldn’t keep at it. Accepting the first open posting available to her, she transferred back into the Starfleet Intelligence Technology Analysis Bureau.

PLAYING WITH TIME (2375 – 2379)

While her various positions in the Technical Analysis Bureau and the Special Operations Bureau had allowed Reyes to dabble in many of Starfleet’s stranger sides, none were stranger than the posting she landed in 2375 as a Temporal Investigations Case Officer. Time travel was an acknowledged reality of the future, and Starfleet had policies if someone found themselves temporally displaced, but that’s where it ended as the public was concerned. Reyes quickly discovered a very different reality. As opposed to everything she’d learned in the Academy, temporal incursions weren’t a rarity. Quite to the contrary, the secretive unit she’d landed in sat on an axis of a cold war known to few outside of it.

During her four years in temporal investigations, Reyes discovered strange new places, and times, unlike anything she’d ever anticipated. Their primary mission was to stave off meddling from the future. Whenever hints of temporal incursions were detected, her team was dispatched. While a lot of their work occurred in Federation space, they also deployed into Romulan, Klingon, Cardassian and Tholian space. Sometimes they conducted their operations at the request of alien governments, while other times they went covertly without any invitation.

DABBLING IN MAINLINE SERVICE (2379 – 2384)

While Reyes enjoyed her work in temporal investigations, she realized that if she remained there, her career would dead end. Their work was hush-hush, even more so than her previous posting in special operations. This meant her service record was devoid of any new commendations. For someone who eventually grew restless with every posting she’d ever had, this was concerning. This led her to look for opportunities elsewhere.

In 2379, Reyes was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and offered a commission as Assistant Chief Intelligence Officer on a large starbase. She accepted with bittersweet emotions. Along the Cardassian border, Starbase 401 was the perfect place to prove her worth. Reyes’ background in intelligence and knowledge of neighboring powers came in very handy. She distinguished herself as a flexible leader able to adapt and bend to whatever the job required.

Two years later, her hard work as an Assistant Chief paid off when she received an offer to serve as Chief Intelligence Officer on the USS Valhalla, a task force flagship in the Fourth Fleet. In the post-Dominion era, her experience with Cardassian and Dominion technology and intelligence proved valuable, and her ability to juggle multiple simultaneous work streams made her a skilled department head for the logistical center of a frontier-facing task force. She developed close relationships with the command staff, and later that year, when the Executive Officer was reassigned, her Commanding Officer went out on a limb and promoted her to the position rather than seeking a more qualified Executive Officer. Commander Reyes found leadership an interesting challenge and dove headlong into it. Her Commanding Officer’s reviews were stellar. After a year, he recommended her for the Command Academy.

The Command Academy didn’t turn out as Reyes anticipated. Coming into it, she expected to leave it with a commission as a Commanding Officer of a starship in the fleet; however, as she went through the program, she found most of the exercises very mundane. Too much of traditional command seemed to focus on managing the minutiae, and thus she decided not to seek a starship command upon graduating.

Instead of commanding a starship, Reyes reached out to her connections in Starfleet Intelligence. It just so happened they had a Section Chief position within the Technology Analysis Bureau they’d been struggling to fill. With her newfound command training, and her former experience with the bureau, she was the perfect fit. Newly minted Captain Reyes accepted the post, embracing the opportunity to dive back into the weird.

THE ROMULAN TRAGEDY (2384-2387)

A research scientist, an intelligence analyst, and a versatile administrator, all rolled up into one, Captain Reyes excelled as a Section Chief within Starfleet Intelligence’s Technical Analysis Bureau. She thrived on the fast flow of information and developed a reputation for being able to keep track of many simultaneous flows of intelligence. A year into the job, intelligence reached them, starting in whispers, that became her section’s primary focus. According to leaks coming out of the Romulan Empire, the star around which Romulus orbited was behaving increasingly erratically, and internally, the Empire’s scientists feared an eminent supernova. Her section continued digging until finally the Romulan Empire acknowledged the impending catastrophe publically.

As the Federation ramped up a heroic effort to build a rescue fleet to evacuate Romulus and Remus, they needed capable technical administrators to lead various elements of the effort. Recognizing her renaissance traits, Fleet Admiral Teylas Ramar, Commanding Officer of the Fourth Fleet, promoted Captain Reyes to Commodore and transferred her to Starfleet R&D as Deputy Director for its Shipbuilding Technologies Division. In building a fleet of 10,000 warp capable ferries, any shipbuilding innovation could have a huge impact. Reyes poured her heart and soul into the job, working ludicrously long hours. Ultimately, her effort was for naught with the synth uprising that destroyed Utopia Planitia on April 5, 2385.

As fortune would have it, Reyes was at a meeting on Rigel with a commercial shipbuilding conglomerate when the synths rose up. The destruction of the stomping grounds of her youth, and the deaths of many less fortunate friends and colleagues, devastated Commodore Reyes. She had no time to grieve though. Accepting the post of a friend who’d perished at Utopia Planitia, Reyes was quickly promoted to Rear Admiral and Director of the Frontier Sciences Division of Starfleet R&D. Starfleet had called the evacuation off, something she fundamentally disagreed with, but there was still a chance that they could do something to stave off the supernova. The fate of billions hung on that chance.

For the following two years, her organization chased strange and exotic leads that might offer a way to stop the premature supernova. Unfortunately, time was not on their side, and the Romulan star went supernova before any solution could be deployed.

LAST BASTION ON THE FRONTIER (2387-2394)

Between Utopia Planitia, which had gravely wounded the Federation, and the destruction of Romulus and Remus, which destabilized the interstellar landscape, the galaxy of the late 2380’s was a very different one from just a few years earlier. Starfleet, for its sake, mostly turned in on itself as isolationist sentiments grew within the Federation. Picard famously described, of this time, that “it wasn’t Starfleet anymore”, and this shift led to separations not just of Picard, but also members of the Fourth Fleet leadership including its Commanding Officer. In the void, Fleet Admiral Oliver Tidwell was made the Commanding Officer of the Fourth Fleet. Recognizing the importance of an intelligence analyst to track a chaotic interstellar scene, a scientist to maintain their reduced frontier infrastructure, and a versatile administrator, Tidwell selected Reyes as Fleet Executive Officer.

Using Faltan Station, an outpost on the edge of Romulan space, as her headquarters, Reyes’ primary responsibility in this chaotic period was to oversee the Fleet’s presence near the collapsing Empire’s borders. While many lamented Starfleet pull back, including Reyes at a conceptual level, it made an interesting challenge for her at a practical level. With a large reduction in force, she had to get creative to maintain their defenses, intelligence capabilities and logistical functions. Her background also prepared her for the challenge of dealing with the various factions of the post-supernova Romulan Empire, as well as other factions like Klingon houses looking to take advantage of the situation.

For four years, the Fourth Fleet tried to continue business as usual, but by the time Fleet Admiral Tidwell retired in 2390, the Fourth Fleet was Starfleet’s last real bastion on the frontier. In order to address what had become an increasingly complex logistical problem of managing a greater range of frontier territories from within a single Fleet, a Fleet Command Council was created. Admiral Reyes was appointed as one of its three members.

CARRYING ON IN THE IMAGE (2394-2399)

The Starfleet of 2394 looked nothing like the Starfleet of a decade earlier. It had withdrawn within its borders, and even the Fourth Fleet had been forced to drastically pull back. As much as she hated to admit it, Starfleet had become an idle spectator, and Admiral Reyes had grown tired of the uphill battle, fought day after day within Starfleet Command, to be anything more than that. She longed to return to the stars, to carry the message of the Federation she’d remembered. To that end, she used what favors she still had to arrange for a five year mission of research and exploration beyond the Federation’s borders. It required her to give up her desk job, something she did willingly, to lead it herself, as one of the conditions for the mission was that it operated independently without any substantial commitment of resources or support from Starfleet Command. For the task, they gave Fleet Admiral Reyes the USS Khonsu and Captain Gerard Devreux, a restless explorer who they couldn’t find anything better to do with.

For half a decade, Reyes, Devreux and the USS Khonsu wandered the stars. They made first contacts, explored dead worlds and discovered mysteries long forgotten, carrying on the explorer spirit of Starfleet that had faded with the xenophobic, isolationist sentiments that had come over the Federation following the First Contact Day massacre and the collapse of traditional interstellar politics following the Romulan supernova. The support from Starfleet for their mission increasingly diminished over the years, and were it not for the Undersecretary of Starfleet Exploration, her mission might have been straight scrapped by those who felt it needlessly wasted resources.

Unfortunately, while Reyes was away, things were amiss at home. Former intelligence colleagues reported growing concerns of subterfuge, corruption and a complete disregard for the Federation’s founding principles from within the Fleet’s leadership. Reyes could not ignore what she heard, and she asked Captain Devreux to return her to Federation space. There, she linked up with former intelligence and Admiralty colleagues who helped her assemble cases against members of the Fourth Fleet’s leadership from the Command Council on down. Even with the resignation of Admirals Lauren Archer, Zachary O’Connell and Paka Larem in protest of the corruption, the Fleet’s leadership would not entertain the case. Reyes had to go public in order to get the attention her case needed. Ultimately, working with former Fleet Admirals Teylas Ramar, Oliver Tidwell, and Sorac Dunar, and Admirals Anatole Lazarus, Elizabeth Wolf and Hars Darax, the conspirators were brought to justice. This included the court martials of Vice Admiral Yewande Banda and Rear Admiral Stanley Morgan, as well as the resignation of many Commanding Officers and Flag Officers, and it sowed a great deal of doubt for the future of Starfleet, an organization that was already only a shell of what it once was. In the aftermath, Fleet Admiral Reyes had no interest in returning to a leadership role after the corruption debacle, and Fleet Admiral Teylas Ramar left his position as Federation Undersecretary of Starfleet Exploration to head up the Fourth Fleet.

THE OSIRIS INITIATIVE (2399)

They say good things are often borne of hardship, and never was that more true that with the events at the end of the 24th century. Following a decade of recession culminating in what was almost a coup of the Admiralty, in 2399, the Orisis Initiative was announced as a rebirth of Starfleet’s mission of exploration and discovery. A flag officer without an assigned command, Reyes was given a number of options related to the new initiative. She chose to return to the stars, taking directorship of a newly created Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity from aboard a newly minted Odyssey-class starship, the USS Polaris.