Blackwatch

Blackwatch is the USS Rubicon's tactical response element: a small, elite team drawn from the ship's own company and trained for the situations a border-patrol vessel meets that ordinary duty personnel are not equipped to handle. Boarding a derelict that may not be as dead as it looks. Repelling an incursion when the line finally gets tested. Recovering people or materiel from a hazardous environment. Going first into the away mission nobody wants.

A standing tactical element is uncommon aboard a ship of the Rubicon's type, and that is precisely the point. Her posting demands it. On a stretch of the Neutral Zone where Romulan probing, Klingon friction, and the constant threat of an incident turning hot are simply the conditions of the job, the Rubicon runs a trained, ready team rather than improvising one when the moment comes. It is a reflection of how seriously the ship takes the line she watches.

Blackwatch is a squad, roughly a dozen personnel selected from a crew of six hundred, deliberately kept small. On a ship of the Rubicon's size an elite response element is measured in the handful who earn a place on it, not in numbers, and a slot on the team is among the harder things to earn aboard. The squad is organized into two fire-teams, Alpha and Bravo, each carrying its own tactical, technical, and medical capability so that either can operate alone or the two can work as one. The Team Leader commands the squad; the Deputy typically takes the second fire-team, so that on an operation Blackwatch can move through two doors at once.

Its members are drawn from across the crew, not just Security. They are cross-trained specialists seconded from their home departments, tactical, engineering, medical, and science, so that any team sent through a hostile airlock carries its own breaching, medicine, and analysis with it. Selection is demanding and membership is a mark of standing aboard the ship.

Blackwatch also serves as the field arm of the Rubicon's intelligence work. On a border where the real contest is fought through information, an intelligence operation frequently needs something to physically happen in hostile space, an operative inserted or pulled out, a defector brought across the line, a meeting secured, intelligence recovered from a ship or site that will not give it up quietly. Intelligence plans and directs such operations; Blackwatch executes them. The two elements work closely enough that a Blackwatch operator and an intelligence officer often plan an operation shoulder to shoulder, one supplying the picture, the other the means to act on it.

Command of Blackwatch in the field falls to the Assistant Chief of Security and Tactical, who serves as its Team Leader, running the unit's selection, training, and operations. The Chief of Security and Tactical commands the ship's overall security and coordinates from the command center during an incident; when Blackwatch deploys, it is the Team Leader who leads it through the door. The arrangement is deliberate, the department head holds the whole picture while the deputy takes the team into the dark.