Annihilation Protocol

Posted on Tue Oct 21st, 2025 @ 5:52am by Lieutenant Commander Lyra Cassiel & Captain Ivan Petrov & Lieutenant Commander Andrei Petrov & Lieutenant Sovas Nyseth & Lieutenant JG Orion Wolff

Mission: S1 Episode 9: Annihilation Protocol
Location: Bridge
Timeline: Date 2372-2-14 at 1615
2023 words - 4 OF Standard Post Measure

The ship rocked again as the turbo lift doors slid open and the four most senior officers on the ship stepped out quickly onto the Bridge. The lights were dim as red alert Klaxons blared, though they were silenced around the same time they exited. Ivan and Andrei made their way down to the command level where they found Nairobi Ellis seated in the command chair.

“Report.” Ivan said strongly.

“It’s the Vidiians, sir.” She said, standing up next to the two command officers who dwarfed her in size. “They warped into the system, four ships strong, and just opened fire without warning.”

Despite the fact she was still a junior officer, Nairobi seemed perfectly calm and prepared. She indicated the viewscreen with a practiced hand. On the viewer, four Vidiian ships issued phaser fire into the fleet as each ship moved defensively.

Lyra had naturally assumed her station after dismissing Simmons. She hadn’t even needed Nairobi’s report to know what was happening. Just as she and Andrei had warned, the Vidiians were here nipping at their heels again. She acquired a lock on the ships and then waited. She was growing so very tired of having to wait.

"Attempting to isolate the shield frequencies of the enemy ships!” Orion declared, his fingers dancing over the console. The sensor feeds streamed telemetry data, revealing the alien shield configurations. With this information, they could calibrate their weapons—phasers or torpedoes—to bypass the shields entirely, avoiding a prolonged and costly engagement.

Failure wasn’t an option. Without a precise match to the shield frequency, the confrontation would devolve into a battle of attrition, a grinding struggle to see whose defenses failed first. The task was painstakingly slow, each passing second amplifying the weight of potential disaster.

The process felt intolerably tedious, made worse by the bitter memory of retreat. They should have faced the Vidiians head-on, delivering a decisive show of strength instead of slinking away. Orion’s thoughts darkened, his frustration turning to dangerous musings. Cruel, inventive diseases danced through his imagination—a reckoning for the Vidiians' arrogance. What could be more fitting than a plague to humble those so proud of their medical expertise?
All he needed were test subjects.

Sovas looked up from his station as the senior staff returned to the bridge. Ivan was back in the center seat, his presence as commanding as ever. But Sovas knew better than to expect stability—not with the Vidiians looming. Relations between them and the Terrans were strained from their initial meeting, even if it had been a lone Vidiian ship and its crew. Still, it seemed they had been looming as a constant shadow, only made worse by their failed negotiations for a cure, ultimately coming from another hand. The bridge activity on the bridge gave the half-Vulcan something to focus on instead of any unease he might be feeling. Authority might have returned with Ivan, but Sovas doubted that calm would merely be a cover for the turbulent undercurrent. Ivan thrived on bold gambles, and Sovas wondered if perhaps they'd finally come to the point where they couldn't afford to pay the price.

Ivan grimaced and realized, immediately, that his officers had been right. These damn creatures wouldn’t give up. As he felt Yana’s hand fall on his arm, he shifted back to the command chair.

“Good job, Ellis. Report to your station in Engineering.” He said, and then turned to the ops console. “Sovas, give me fleetwide.”

"Channel open, Captain." The boatswain's whistle rang out across the fleet, its sharp, piercing tone slicing through the tense silence. Aboard every vessel, even the formidable Vengeance, the sound demanded immediate attention. The fleet was locked in a deadly battle with the Vidiians, their alien ships weaving through the chaos like predators circling wounded prey. The whistle was both a call to order and a grim reminder of the danger bearing down on them.
The danger of losing everything. Of being reduced to lifeless debris and frozen bodies drifting aimlessly through the void. Their mission—and their lives—forgotten, their ship’s story buried as a mere footnote in history. A legacy swallowed by silence and the unyielding march of time.

“Shadow Fleet. This is Captain Petrov. For a year now, we’ve been plagued with the arrogant, slow learning race known as the Vidiians. They refuse us when we seek their assistance; they attack us when we turn away. They do not know that we are Terrans, and I have run out of patience. We will bathe the stars with their blood, and leave the stain for the Galaxy to see.” He said, and immediately cut the channel. “Form up on them, Alpha-6. Destroy them.”

The Vengeance swung around to meet the threat and the fleet followed her. By now, they were quite practiced at ending these creatures, and a precise strike delivered by Lyra’s ship shattered the lead ship like glass and a second crumbled soon after to the rest of the fleet.

Normally, Lyra would have taken great joy in the destruction of her enemies, but this time she found them more of a nuisance in the way to their larger goal.

Orion felt bogged down by the tedium of their standoff with the Vidiian ships. The endless scanning, waiting, and skirmishing had dulled his earlier thoughts of biological vengeance. What once burned as righteous fury now seemed like a futile distraction. He just wanted it to end.

Perhaps the weight of his time aboard the Gladius was finally catching up to him. They’d been trapped in the Delta Quadrant for too long, cut off from Earth and the Empire. Every passing second felt like an anchor, dragging them further from home—and further from anything of real consequence. With its petty skirmishes and fruitless struggles, this backwater wasn’t where they belonged. Orion longed for purpose, a fight that mattered—one that could make a difference to the Empire and its true enemies.

Sovas continued to monitor the sensor feeds, looking for any Vidiian reinforcements, though, it seemed, none were coming. Still, something just made him wish for the Vidiian star to go nova and spare them the tedium of dealing with these infernal aliens.

The two remaining Vidiian ships broke formation with the force of the onslaught and the destruction of their allies. Realizing that their cause was lost, the commanders no doubt decided survival was preferable to a total, pointless death and trailed off in the direction from which they came.

“Boros, pursuit course. They're trying to run, cocks between legs.” Andrei said from his seat in the XO’s chair. His tone was calm as he monitored ship systems on the patch that covered his artificial eye.
Sovas worked swiftly at his console, rerouting the sensors after they’d been knocked offline by debris from the destroyed Vidiian ships. Prioritizing targeting systems had kept them in the fight, but at the cost of their broader situational awareness—a trade-off he hoped wouldn’t come back to haunt them. As the sensors flickered back to full strength, his gaze sharpened at the readings.

"Captain," he said, looking up, his tone steady but urgent. "They’re powering up their engines. All indications suggest they’re preparing to jump to warp."

“We’re not letting them go that easily.” Andrei remarked, a chilling grin crossing his expression as the ships came into their crosshairs again. “Commander Cassiel, give them the cannons.

Lyra didn’t hesitate in the slightest to comply with the command and bared the Vengeance’s impressive weapons against the remaining ships. The bolts of energy soared into the nacelles of the ships attempting to flee, they shattered immediately, fire erupting from the fractures that sprawled out over the hulls of the helpless ships. They broke apart, scattering components and Vidiians out into the void of space.

As the Vidiian vessels cracked up before them like two shattered eggs, Ivan scowled and rose to his feet. His face was resolute, and as cheers filled the Bridge, he raised a gloved hand.

“These Vidiian filth have plagued us for the last time. We will make a righteous slaughter of them that this Quadrant will never forget. I hereby invoke the Annihilation Protocol; our sole purpose, until the task is complete, is to make total war on the Vidiian people.”

As the cheers erupted across the bridge, Orion remained seated, his expression carefully composed. While others celebrated, his thoughts moved with the quiet precision of a blade slicing through fog. The destruction of the Vidiian vessels brought a brief, fleeting satisfaction, but the sight of their crumbling hulks felt... inefficient.

Annihilation Protocol. Orion’s lip twitched in faint disdain. Typically it was wielded as a sledgehammer rather than the precision instrument that it could be. The Vidiians had the numbers, had the advantage, they would need to blunt that advantage. While he was familiar with Ivan's reputation, he hoped it wouldn't be a blinding liability and that they would fight smart, though remembering the journey of the Gladius and the ambush of the Shadow Fleet before he'd transferred to the Vengeance, that had been the result of their wanton path of destruction.

The Vidiians were pests—arrogant pests that deserved to be eradicated, he'd studied the pathogen the crew had nearly fallen prey to and his watched what it could do to a simulated Vidiian. His subject had become a diseased, desperate whelp clinging to life by the barest of threads. How it had broken down their bodies, ravaged its immune system as opportunistic infections had taken hold. His mind began to turn. A genetic plague... yes, something elegant and efficient. Something designed to spread like wildfire through their seemingly perfect bodies, targeting their weaknesses with surgical precision.

He tapped a gloved finger against the armrest of his chair, his eyes narrowing as he turned the idea over in his mind. Such a creation would need refinement, of course—Virulence, incubation rates, even delivery methods—but the potential was undeniable.

He glanced at the Captain and his righteous Terran fervor. He acknowledged it but turned back to his station to begin putting together notes for his project, tuning out the noise as he focused on what might be a masterpiece of genetic warfare.

Sovas’s hands remained steady on the console, though his gaze flicked toward the captain with a flicker of unease. The bridge roared with cheers as Ivan rose to his feet, his gloved hand raised in declaration. The invocation of the Annihilation Protocol was no surprise—its brutality was textbook Terran. Still, it carried implications that even Sovas, with all his training and survival instincts, couldn’t fully ignore.

“Understood, Captain,” he said, waiting for the noise to die down. His tone remained level, betraying nothing as his fingers moved across the console, pulling up logistical data. The flickering readouts displayed resource allocations, fuel reserves, and munitions inventories, all flashing in precise sequence. After a calculated pause, he added, “If I may—successfully prosecuting a campaign of this scale will require a full review of our resources. Sustained operations must be balanced against maintaining the fleet’s readiness.”

His words were exact, offering no opening for misinterpretation. Not dissent—never dissent—but an unspoken reminder of the realities of total war. Sovas’s tone carried no judgment, only the cold logic that came as naturally to him as breathing. The captain would do as he pleased, but Sovas would ensure the ship survived, even if the rest of the quadrant burned.

“Excellent thinking, Lieutenant.” Came a voice from the center of the room. It belonged to Andrei, and it’s owner had stood as well. He had gotten what he had asked for privately in this decision, and he would t have that victory blunted by burdening his father with the practical details. “Anything we find we are in need of, we will simply be able to take from the Vidiians. We’ll have several days to play before we enter their space.”

And play they would.

END