Fire and Ash: The Evacuation of Romulus. A summary.

Posted on Tue Jul 14th, 2026 @ 4:28pm by Captain Freya Mannerheim & Subcommander Kaiae t'Lien & Centurion Nancy Gable & Major Ashley Rogers & Lieutenant Ashix Zirda

2,941 words; about a 15 minute read

Mission: Chapter VIII: Fire and Ash
Timeline: May 2387

Once the Terran threat was dealt with, Ourainavassa met with the other ships of the flotilla at the agreed-upon rendezvous point, before proceeding to the Romulus system. With Captain Mannerheim taking charge of Ourainavassa herself, Subcommander Kaiae and Lieutenant Hatham worked together to coordinate the evacuation operation itself.

The captured hospital ship, as well as the Tal Shiar transport captured by the Terrans and the Captain's allies from Nygard handled the bulk of transport operations, while Ourainavassa and Cat Dancing, as well as Raven's new ship, the Raven's Claw II, provided cover where needed. Both the Claw and the Cat, being smaller ships, also executed some of the more risky extractions, transferring the evacuated passengers over to one of the other vessels before returning for more.

Unfortunately, the mission would not stay simple for too long. While most of the Romulan fleet had begun to withdraw, the Tal Shiar still maintained a firm grip on the system and, as soon as they discovered Ourainavassa and her little flotilla, began causing problems. With about two-thirds of the pick-ups complete, three Tal Shiar ships moved in to intercept the transports. Immediately, Ourainavassa and Raven's Claw responded....

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++ Arnason to Hatham. Thought you'd want to know, we just delivered the last of your family group - including your father! - to the Mnaae Dhael. ++

The big Romulan didn't take his eyes off the other transports he was monitoring, but he did breathe a quiet sigh of relief, particularly since the human's tone carried just enough hint of how difficult it had probably been to get the stubborn old man to join the other refugees instead of insisting on joining them for the next pick-up. "Yes. Thank you. Hope you didn't need to sedate him."

A short human laugh came over the comm. ++ No. But I may have hinted that we were concerned about Tal'Shiar trying to board to take over refugees, so the able-bodied could use someone to lead defense efforts. ++

Now it was Hatham's turn to laugh, though he managed to bite it back to only a chuckle. "I think I see how mirror version succeeded as a Counselor."

++ Hey , now...++ BAM *fzzt*

++ Banter later ++ T'Ango's voice cut in. ++ That Tal'Shiar angle might not be a white lie. Tell any transport with a full load to warp out! ++

Aboard the Cat Dancing Gunnar grabbed the flight controls, jinking to dodge fire, as T'Ango moved to weapons. Their ship empty of all but themselves, they rolled, coming around to fire on the Bird of Prey streaking toward the transports.

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"Boss! There's a Tal Shiar Raptor heading straight for the Olympic-Class!"

Raven unleashed a flurry of curses at her tactical officer's report. Ourainavassa was busy keeping another Tal Shiar ship busy, so this one was on her and her little Klingon bird-of-prey. "Load up torpedo tubes, short range jump. Get us right behind them, and fire!"

Immediately, the Claw's retrofitted experimental spore drive came to life, and an instant later, the ship was in position. As soon as the jump was completed, a volley of plasma torpedoes made short work of the Raptor-class ship. Raven leaned back in the command chair and sighed. "Please tell me we still have some torps left. We're not clear yet."

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Among one of the last groups to picked up, Kaiae's mother, Vareth, cut a rather elegant figure in the Romulan answer to the human business suit; but it was a rather stressed and harried one at the moment; the younger of her cousin Jaelen's two children perched on one hip, the older trailing behind her, along with her husband and her parents. The ship lurched sideways suddenly, sending her shoulder slamming into the bulkhead.

"Where's daddy???" the little girl's voice was age-appropriately close to a whimper at the moment as the ship continued to lurch in evasive maneuvers. Her older brother was silent in comparison, though his eyes were wide.

The accurate answer - 'about to die' (assuming he wasn't already discovered issuing unauthorized travel papers before now and executed for it, that is) - was not one, the banker thought, that would help the situation at the moment.

"I don't know. We'll figure that out later." Vareth turned and passed the child to her mother; noting as she did so that the older woman's eyes were still blazing with the fury they had been for weeks now; that of someone being forced to rapidly re-evaluate that their position and value in society was not nearly what she had counted it as.

"Get people away from the airlocks and further into the ship." Vareth had never held the sort of military or political ambitions her daughter had once held: She had done a minimum term of service as a logistics officer; then returned to the city she'd grown up in and gotten a job at the bank. It had been - occasional business travel in civilian liners notwithstanding - decades since she had been on a ship; and only a handful of times she'd ever been on a ship in combat; but 'don't hang out near airlocks during a fight' was about as basic as it got.

This was the last group, she thought wearily, hurry up and warp the hell out of here before we hit more serious resistance.

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"Skidbladnir reports at capacity," Mila relayed as she read off from the tactical overview console. As her scientific skills were unlikely to be called upon during this situation, she had volunteered to handle inter-flotilla comms. "Captain Eilif has confirmed your mother is on board, Subcommander. Sending you the full manifest."

She took a sip from the large raktajino she had brought from the mess hall, and got back to work. "James Bedford was attacked by a Tal Shiar Raptor-class vessel, but Raven handled it. I wish we had one of those spore drives. They're just waiting for one more group currently in transit. Mnaae Dhael is also at full capacity and moving to warp out."

Captain Mannerheim smirked as she looked over from the command chair. "If I've been keeping track in my head correctly, that means once that last shuttle reaches the Bedford, we've got everyone we can, right? Subcommander?"

"Yes. And frankly, everyone we can and still leave alive." Kaiae emphasized - it was honestly rather shocking they'd managed to stay in one piece at all so far once the wheels had started to come off their cover IDs; and they'd only managed that much because it looked to her eyes like the fleet defending the homeworld was rather reduced from its usual. "Remus run is also complete. No contact with the ships picking up people on the list from the other core words, but if they were successful we'll see them at the rally point."

Freya nodded as she watched Mnaae Dhael, the hulking D'deridex brought by Dr. Gable's friends, warp out, soon followed by Skidbladnir, the ship brought by her Prime Universe counterpart's grandfather.

Before she could say something, she was interrupted by Mila. "Tiny ship just came out of warp, Federation civilian registry. It's heading straight for the star. Oh, and the Bedford reports loading completed."

The Captain shook her head. "Not our business. Whoever it is can count themselves lucky that we're keeping the remnants of the Romulan fleet busy." She turned to Kaiae and Mila. "I know you're the one in charge of the operation, Subcommander, but I think it's time."

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"The Olympic-class is loaded up and heading out, boss. Operation complete."

Raven acknowledged her tactical officer's report with a smirk. The plan had actually worked. Wistfully, she looked out at Ourainavassa, the ship built for her by her father, the ship she had captured with her old crew, the ship that had gone through so much. They were in good hands now. "Right. We wait until the last ship has departed, then continue our own mission. Give me a rundown of our status."

"Torpedoes are depleted, disruptors are busted, and we've sustained quite a bit of damage, but we're good to get out of here. Few weeks in dry dock, though."

"That'll be a nice little break after all this," Raven replied with a chuckle. Just then, however, she spotted something that shook her deeply. A heavily damaged D'deridex, on a direct collision course to the James Bedford. None of the other ships in the flotilla would be there quickly enough to intervene. With the Claw all but disarmed, she knew what had to be done.

"Number One," she said, addressing her First Officer. "Transport all hands to the Bedford. That's an order. Do not argue with me. I'm going to stop that D'deridex."

"But, boss..."

Raven held her hand up. "I said don't argue. Go. Now." Her tone held a finality that made it clear to the others that, indeed, any argument would be pointless. "And give this to Captain Mannerheim," Raven added as an aside, taking off her pauldron cape and her gunsabre.

As soon as the crew had evacuated, Raven set the spore jump coordinates for the precise location of the D'deridex. "See you soon, Ellie," she muttered as she hit the launch button.

----------

Ash sits nursing a drink as Renee shows up behind the counter.

"You look like we didn't just save the flotilla," Renee says. "Or is moping your new thing? Because if that's the case, we should've kept the other one."

Ash looked up. "What?"

Renee rolls her eyes, "You heard me."

"Feels like this rescue took years.... so much happened. And Raven... and the other me.... trying to make sense of it all," Ash takes a sip of her drink.

"Sometimes it doesn't make sense. And you take the wins. You'd think you'd know that by now. The flotilla was saved. So you take that wallowing in whatever existential crisis you're having and figure it out before you leave here tonight," Renee said.

Ash looks at her, "You should not be a counselor."

Renee slides Ash another drink, "That's why I'm the chef and bartender. You keep me in business."

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From the primary console of the Ourainavassa’s Systems Control, Ashix Zirda didn't process the evacuation of Romulus as a tragic exodus. She processed it as a massive, screaming cascade of data that she was responsible for understanding and navigating.

Her cybernetic eye whirred, cycling rapidly through spectrums as she monitored the flotilla's power grids. When the Tal Shiar dropped their cloaks and opened fire, Ashix’s organic hand flew across the console, rerouting auxiliary power to the structural integrity fields before the Captain could even bark the order. The sensory input was staggering, bleeding directly into her residual neural implants—the violent hum of the Claw’s spore drive snapping through subspace, the chaotic telemetry of the Cat Dancing jinking through crossfire, and the mass readouts of the Mnaae Dhael leaping to warp. Every departed transport was a sub-routine closed. Then came the sudden, horrific telemetry spike as the Raven's Claw II vanished into a final, deliberate collision path. The data logged the sacrifice with cold, mathematical finality.

Hours later, the data had quieted, but the noise in Ashix’s mind had not.

Sitting in the dim sanctuary of the ship's mess hall, she stared blankly into her glass, the Borg implants fused to her face feeling heavy. Her systems were still trying to categorize the sheer chaos of the day, filtering through the tactical logs of ships saved and lives lost. The lingering hum of the ship's engines thrummed through her cybernetic housing, a constant baseline to the existential math she couldn't seem to solve. She took a slow, deliberate sip of the burning liquid, letting the chemical burn disrupt the algorithmic loops in her head. She had survived assimilation, the collapse of submatrices, and the destruction of a Borg Sphere, yet this victory felt entirely corrupted by its cost. Her organic eye squinted slightly against the low light of the lounge as she muttered to herself, trying to force the individual fragments of her thoughts into something resembling order.

-------

Nancy paced the now (mostly) quiet medbay. There hadn't been major injuries from the brief attack by Tal'Shiar (May they have burned as they forced others to, she thought bitterly) but a ship packed with desperate people, many of whom had risked much to get to pick up sites and bore the marks to prove it, and then the typical injuries from a ship rocked from impacts had made for a medbay so packed that she hadn't even yelled (much) at Arnason when he arrived and went to right to work despite scattered burn marks and a roughly dermaplazed head wound. But she had ordered T'Ango to stop hopping around and made her sit in a rolling chair to offer her field medic skills for sprains and light injuries.

Honestly it might have just been relief to see them. Cat Dancing had taken a hit just before jumping to warp and was now tractored to 'Vassa. She smiled to herself thinking of how Gunnar had come dashing in carrying T'Ango, but both grinning, exultant - if not for the blood on his temple, the compression bandage on her lower leg and the smell of singed fur and hair, they might have looked like newlyweds with him carrying her across the threshold. Of course that was before they'd heard that Raven hadn't beamed out with the rest of her crew...

She glanced over at them - sound asleep. Adrenaline, coffee, and triox would only keep you going for so long. Not that she'd given them much choice; she hadn't known both them so long without learning a few tricks and so when things wound down she'd told Arnason that the only way he was staying in medbay tonight was if he swore to nurse only T'Ango, by making sure she stayed in bed. He'd agreed readily enough (if Divash had been here, there'd have been a joke about providing a privacy curtain) and pushed beds together, wrapping an arm around her as she nestled her head under his chin. About two minutes of cuddling like that and they'd been out cold.

Now it was just her and Kaol. The 'greatest surgeon in the quadrant' hadn't had much need for his vaunted skills, but he had been surprisingly good with the little kids who needed care. He might just make a good doctor yet. Good enough that she might let him lean on that Romulan superior stamina they were all so proud of and go get some shut-eye herself. After a nice stiff drink.

-------

The chaos of the evacuation itself; and the damage to various ships taken in it; had resulted in a few instances in some civilians currently now occupying the Ourainavassa itself.

It wasn't until some time afterwards that any of the ship's crew had been able to sort out exactly who was or was not where in many cases; but once she had rotated off duty, Seira had made a beeline to the storage bay she'd heard her family was in at the moment. Now her eyes scanned the crowd impatiently until they finally locked onto familiar faces. One of these - her sister's eldest - was the first to draw the young pilot's notice with a wide, relieved grin; because aunt and niece were rather closer in age than Seira was with any of her brothers and sisters.

"Zhara!" The fourteen year old's head snapped up at the familiar voice, as did several others nearby; and suddenly Seira felt a bolt of nervousness as a variety of eyes were now on her from her father's to her grandmother's; reminding her that she had entered into this entire venture - in what seemed ages ago but had only been a year or two past - without any of their approval. That uncertainty melted away a moment of two later, though; when the hints of an approving smile pulled the corners of her grandmother's lips up, and was replaced by a degree of shock as her sister Miana gave her a proud little dip of her head just-so in a gesture between equals; the first time she'd ever received such from any of her siblings.

-------

Captain Mannerheim sat in Raven's old ready room, simply staring out of the window. They had actually pulled it off, unbelievable as it may seem. But success had come at a price. Even as a Terran, Raven's sacrifice hit her hard. But by using her own ship as a weapon to destroy the Tal Shiar D'deridex, she had saved the James Bedford, and the many refugees on it. For that, she had redeemed herself, and would be remembered as a hero - at least, that was what Freya hoped.

She took a deep breath and stood, briefly glancing at her Terran uniform jacket on the sofa, and began walking towards the door to the bridge. The refugees were safe for now, but they still had nowhere to put them, and Ourainavassa was in dire need of repairs. There was a lot of work still to be done.

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