USS Medea
The USS Medea, NCC-81901, was a Federation starship of the Akira Class. She was commissioned in 2388 and served briefly in actions against the Borg and the Cardassians in the early 2390s.
In 2393, the USS Medea was conducting long-range exploration missions in the Beta Quadrant when she mysteriously disappeared without a distress signal nor any sign of wreckage.
Starfleet Command having little information as to her exact whereabouts conducted a broad search with no success, after sixteen months of searching she was declared lost with all hands.
That was only partially true.
The ship had, in fact, detected signs of an early Class E/F (Atomic/Space Age) civilization in the Irlix system. True to it's tenants, the ship moved in to investigate and conduct early cultural studies of the Irlixians.
A small away team was cosmetically altered and sent down to observe the culture and technology of the planet's inhabitants. During the time while the away team was on the planet, an unknown event took place which caused the Medea to spiral out of control and crash into the planet.
The ship remained remarkably intact, although all the crew aboard her were killed in the crash. The vessel struck the continent located in the northwestern region of the planet.
The various governments of the planet immediately all laid claim to the wreckage of the starship and the technological advances that it could yield and a world-wide war began.
This conflict allowed the four greatest powers, The United Confederation of Mol, The Gab Union, The Banok Empire and the Nuveric Republic to absorb smaller political areas and bolster their own power. Eventually, the Gab Union became the clear and decisive victor after the mysterious appearance of an Irlixian scientist named Khoda Rhone.
Rhone seemed to have an innate understanding of the alien technology and quickly began to decipher it for the use of the Union. His contributions allowed him to seize power of that political body and rename it the Rhone Union in his own honor. He established the capital city of his new empire on the original Medea crash site and called it Khoda City.
Once the war was won and an uneasy peace established, Rhone set out to decipher more of the alien technology in an attempt to better the lives of his people and to bring his dreams of world unification under his authority closer to fruition.
For that purpose, he established the Seliya Facility located inside the mountain of the same name. Into the Magnesite laden ore, he cut an extensive underground facility which included a hanger large enough to hold all the remains of the Medea, as well as hundreds of scientific labs and research facilities.
Over the course of the next decade, Rhone led the development of the technologies salvaged from the crashed starship until he was able to build the first Irlixian starship with a Warp Drive. It was this first starship that was detected by the crew of the USS Champlain in 2406, although they were unable to properly investigate their findings.
Later, in 2413, the USS Bohrs would be sent back to Irlixian space to follow-up on the discovery made by the champlain crew. They would subsequently be discovered when their Cloaking device failed after a computer attack crippled their ship.
The USS Rosenante was dispatched afterwards to rescue the crew of the Bohrs, destroy or recover that ship and in the process discovered the true fate of the USS Medea and the mysterious true identity of Khoda Rhone.
The USS Medea was first seen in the USS Rosenante mission: The Gilded Man.
