The USS Ragnarok and the Romulans

1. Overview

Between 2390 and 2392 the USS Ragnarok, a Starfleet carrier based at Starbase 185, dealt more directly with the Romulan Star Empire than any other Federation ship of its time. It patrolled the point where the Federation, Klingon and Romulan borders meet, carried out a classified operation inside Romulan space, hosted a Romulan envoy aboard, and stood between an Imperial strike group and the Remans of T’Met in the crisis of 2391. When the Federation needed a base close to the Romulan border, it was the Ragnarok that turned T’Met into one.

Very little of this was ever announced. Much of what follows comes from Starfleet’s own records, from the inquiry that followed T’Met, and from what the Remans have said in public since. Where the record is sealed, this article says so. Its crew are not named here. For the T’Met Republic itself, see T'Met; for the Remans as a people, see The Remans.

The Empire remembers the Ragnarok well. To Romulan officers on this border it is the ship that crossed their line without being seen, that was present when a Romulan envoy died, and that took T’Met out of the Empire’s hands. That reputation travels with any Starfleet ship that works this border now.

2. The Tri-Border and the Hub (2390)

The Ragnarok’s first Romulan assignment took it to the region near Starbase 24, where the Klingon, Federation and Romulan borders meet. The starbase was being rebuilt after the Kzinti destroyed it, and in its absence the traffic of the region had found its own shelter: a makeshift outpost built from freighters, known simply as the Hub, sitting where more than twenty-six transport lanes crossed. Some of those lanes ran into Federation space; the rest ran into Romulan and Klingon territory.

The Hub was welcome at first and dangerous soon after. Raiders began attacking civilian transports inside Romulan and Klingon space, killing crews and taking cargo. The Romulans blamed the Klingons, who had been crossing into Romulan space on raids of their own for some time; the Klingons blamed the Romulans; and both demanded that the Federation act. The Ragnarok was ordered to patrol inside Federation space, to protect every freighter whatever its origin, and to disable rather than destroy any Romulan or Klingon craft it met.

2.1 The talks that failed

A Romulan ambassador, V’rel, and a Klingon general came aboard to talk. The talks went badly. V’rel accused the Ragnarok of probing Romulan defences, said the Federation was weakening from within, and charged the Klingons with undermining the Empire’s efforts to rebuild its border settlements. The ship’s captain answered that the Federation had done nothing along that border but help to rebuild Romulan settlements and infrastructure. A Vulcan Federation envoy took over the talks, without much more success. The Romulan delegation warned that any crossing of the border would be treated as an act of war, refused to share its sensor data, and left with the remark that it would be some time before the Empire sought the Federation’s help again.

3. Ad Pontes (2390)

The raiders were a pirate band calling itself the Black Spades. The Ragnarok traced them to Ad Pontes, a planet about five light years inside Romulan space, directly across the border from Khitomer. The Empire had declared it uninhabited, and Klingon raids had always passed it by, which is why the pirates had gone unnoticed there. Reconnaissance found close to a thousand of them behind a walled base, with warp-capable craft of their own.

Starfleet Command approved an operation to end them. How the Ragnarok entered Romulan territory is still sealed. Starfleet’s own account says only that the ship engaged pirate forces “along the Romulan border in a classified operation” on stardate 67213.4, early in 2390, that no Romulan vessel was harmed, and that care was taken to give the Empire no cause for war. The cost was heavy. Casualties among the ship’s Marines and pilots ran as high as forty percent, in part because a Marine officer had passed the plans to the pirates; he was later court-martialled. The pirates were driven off the planet.

The Empire never protested the operation in public. In private it knew. At T’Met the following year, a Romulan commander told the Ragnarok’s captain that the Empire knew about the operations the ship had carried out in its territory, and the forces it had used. He called it a violation of the Neutral Zone. See Romulans and the Federation and The Neutral Zone (2393).

4. A Romulan Envoy Aboard

For a time the Ragnarok carried a resident Romulan envoy: Sub-Commander Felaen i-Ramnau t’Lehu, accredited as ambassador of the Romulan Star Empire to the Federation, with offices aboard behind doors etched with the Empire’s emblem. She had served in the Imperial Fleet’s own intelligence branch, and the Empire made no secret of it. Starfleet Intelligence confirmed her past and remarked that the Romulans had more or less legally placed a spy in the Federation’s ranks. Her family was well placed: her husband was a Fleet intelligence commander, and his brother, Jhondar tr’Lehu, sat in the Senate. Her stated hope was to improve the way the Federation saw her people, and in time to see Romulans and Vulcans reunited. See Dissidents, Splinters and Unification.

The crew watched her closely and never fully trusted her. She would prove, at T’Met, to be more than the crew had assumed.

5. T’Met: The Call (2391)

The Remans of T’Met had slipped away from Imperial control and declared their own republic. The Empire’s answer came in stages. First it pressed them to return. Then it cut T’Met off from the supply lines of its neighbours, set up blockades, and landed small groups of troops that took several towns and one city before T’Met’s security forces drove them out. Days after the Romulans withdrew, an outbreak killed the entire population of Fa’ran, T’Met’s third largest city: almost seventy thousand people. The dead were buried in mass graves around the city.

T’Met’s Senate debated for a week whether to ask an outside power for help. Then the Caliph, Wen’Dea, signed the law that allowed it and called the Federation. Starfleet’s diplomatic office called the response a mission of mercy, and the Ragnarok, then docked at Starbase 241, was sent within forty-eight hours. Its orders were to give scientific and security support, and to put no one on the ground without the Republic’s consent. A further part of those orders, kept from most of the crew, noted that T’Met lay in a very good position for any future operations into Romulan territory. That part would come out later.

5.1 The weapon

The ship’s medical staff worked with T’Met’s own doctors at Fa’ran, starting at the city’s largest market, where the agent had been released. It had been spread as a liquid that evaporated onto surfaces, most likely from small devices that could be carried in by hand. The Remans had already closed rivers and set a transporter exclusion zone of a hundred kilometres around the city. Starfleet Intelligence supplied its files on Romulan weapons of this kind, and the comparison was made aboard the Ragnarok.

Not all of the ship’s people on the ground were doctors. On orders from above, and over the strong objection of the ship’s chief medical officer, intelligence officers went down disguised as medical staff to build a profile of the planet and its defences. When this came out, it damaged the Remans’ trust in the Federation for a long time.

6. The Standoff

Two Romulan warbirds of the D’deridex class decloaked over T’Met. The lead ship was the IRV Aen-Terrh, under Commander Havrahah ir-Nnverih tr’Trayol, whose father sat in the Senate. Trayol told the Ragnarok that the people of T’Met were still citizens of the Empire. The operation was directed from the Senate by Jhondar tr’Lehu, who had asked his sister-in-law aboard the Ragnarok for the ship’s fighter strength. She refused.

Instead, Felaen t’Lehu came to the Ragnarok’s bridge and stood with the Federation. She invoked Trayol’s father by name, and the warbirds powered down. The Romulan fighter wing then spent days testing the Ragnarok’s patrols with mock dogfights, under orders not to fire. One of the carrier’s pilots answered them on an open channel in fluent Romulan, which they did not take well.

Senator tr’Lehu’s own words, as later reported, show how the Senate saw T’Met. The Remans were “a small group that managed to slip away”, and the Empire had expected them to die off. The Senate itself was divided between those who wanted to let T’Met go and those who wanted it back at any price. See Government of the Empire.

7. The Sharlos Bombing

A second power had arrived at T’Met. The Uioran Alliance, a trading power whose territory lies north of the system, sent a broker, Sardin L’Set, with offers of mining rights to T’Met’s tritanium, dilithium and a large trilithium deposit, and then an offer of Alliance membership with the Remans leading its military. Felaen t’Lehu asked to attend the talks in the capital, Sharlos, as the Empire’s representative. She was searched and given a Marine escort.

At the Chamber of Government Affairs a Reman woman from the planet’s arid north, who hated the Romulans and wanted revenge on a Romulan target, carried a masked explosive past a Marine checkpoint. Felaen t’Lehu saw the device and threw herself and a damping device onto the bomber. The envoy, her guards, the bomber and the Uioran broker were all killed. The Caliph was lightly hurt; the Ragnarok’s captain was badly wounded, and the ship’s chief medical officer became the acting Federation representative on T’Met.

The Federation’s view was that the envoy herself had been the target, and that the bomber may have been used by a third party. The Romulan pilots over T’Met came to a different conclusion: that the Federation had murdered the person the Empire sent to speak to it.

8. The Battle Over T’Met

Within hours more than five hundred Romulan Scorpion fighters launched, some of them flying in support of Romulan troops on the ground. The Ragnarok’s air wing held orbit and struck the lead warbird with quantum torpedoes. What followed was more than a day of attrition and then a stalemate. The carrier lost a squadron and more of its fighters, and pilots and Marines were killed. Starfleet’s analysts later noted that the Scorpion’s design had been developed from intelligence taken from Starfleet’s own systems. See Ships of the Empire and The Imperial Fleet.

9. Settlement

The settlement was made on two fronts. On T’Met the acting Federation representative set aside the terms she had been given and drafted a new offer: safe mining, help with farming, help building a defence force and a satellite perimeter, a permanent Starfleet presence, and schools, hospitals and museums. The Caliph put it on a one-year stay before a vote of the Republic’s Senate, observing that the Federation would also be using his world to watch the Empire. In the meantime T’Met placed itself under Federation protection in exchange for a small share of its resources, and declared any Romulan presence an illegal occupation.

In orbit, the Ragnarok’s captain showed Trayol proof, confirmed by a third party, that the weapon used at Fa’ran matched earlier Romulan weapons. Trayol accepted it in private. He reported to Senator tr’Lehu that the Federation knew what had been done, and recommended withdrawal. The Senator agreed, and spoke of a later course of “infiltration and dissension” to bring T’Met back. The warbirds left. The Ragnarok promised that at least one Federation ship would remain in orbit at all times.

The Uioran Alliance lost its foothold. The Empire lost T’Met, and was shamed in front of the Remans it had tried to take back. The Federation gained a partner in a very strategic place. When the Republic’s Senate finally voted, it chose the Federation, and T’Met was admitted in 2392. See T'Met.

10. Afterward

10.1 The inquiry

The Ragnarok’s captain faced a board of inquiry. Admirals asked whether intervening by force in a conflict between T’Met and the Empire had broken the Prime Directive. The use of intelligence officers under medical cover came out at the inquiry, and part of that testimony was struck from the record; the official position was only that T’Met, so close to the Romulan border, was of strategic importance. One admiral argued that without the ship’s actions the Federation would have lost T’Met, which Starfleet Intelligence considered a priority location.

10.2 The northern border

The ship’s patrol area became the northern reach of the Romulan border and the space beyond it, out of Starbase 185. Romulan observation craft were known to hide in the storms of the Alteran Expanse near the border, and the crew expected the Empire to seek revenge for T’Met. When three Starfleet ships went missing within a month while surveying the Elorg Rift, inside the Expanse, Starfleet Command at first feared the Romulans had taken or destroyed them. Monitoring stations along the Zone had reported more Romulan activity than usual, mostly science vessels, and the Empire did not answer requests for its sensor data. The cause turned out to be the Rift itself, not the Empire.

11. T’Met as a Staging Base (2392)

When Borg activity was detected just outside Romulan territory and Starbase 185 was lost, T’Met was the Federation’s best remaining base in the region. The Ragnarok was sent back. The welcome was cool at first: the Remans had not forgotten the intelligence officers in medical uniforms, and Starfleet admitted the earlier operation had been badly handled. After three days of talks the Caliph set his terms: permanent Federation defensive guarantees for T’Met, and a seat at the table in any campaign against the Borg launched from his system. Starfleet agreed within the hour.

T’Met became the forward staging base for the Federation’s counter-offensive in the Typhon sector. The Ragnarok’s crew rebuilt the planet’s defence network and trained Reman pilots, and a T’Met task force sailed with the carrier. In the Typhon Expanse the Reman cruiser Tal’Vesh was lost with the Starfleet ship Hale. Remans of T’Met had died fighting beside Starfleet, and the Republic has not let the Federation forget it. After that campaign the Ragnarok left the region for a long refit, and in 2392 passed to a new commanding officer.

12. What It Means on the Border Now

The Ragnarok’s years on the Romulan border set much of what the Federation and the Empire now believe about each other. The Empire believes Starfleet will cross the line when it wants to and deny it afterward. It believes the Federation used a mission of mercy to take a Reman world, and it holds a Federation ship responsible, fairly or not, for the death of a Romulan envoy. The Federation, for its part, has the Empire’s weapon at Fa’ran on record, and the Senate’s own talk of “infiltration and dissension” to bring T’Met back. Neither side has forgotten. See The Romulan Side of the Zone and Romulans and the Federation.