Biography: Alcar Dovan, Executive Officer
Played By: Larry Phalen
Voice Sample: Callback, 6/25/07 - Scene 10006(b)
Assignment: U.S.S. Excelsior
Position: Executive Officer
Rank: Lieutenant Commander
Name: Alcar Dovan
Sex: Male
Race: Bolian
Date of Birth: 16 February 2311 (age 72)
Origin: Gault
Height: 1.82 m
Weight: 70 kg
Eyes: Blue
Hair: None
Starfleet Profile
Physical
As an athlete, I take pride in my physical prowress. I train regularly in the holosuite. It's the only thing that keeps the fat off me, though I suppose my metabolism (which resembles that of the Antarean Dung Beatle) helps with that. Sadly, except on Risa, the blue skin tends to remove me from intrigues with the gentler sex. And I've never had the chance to get to Risa. I don't have the greatest strength, but I've got stamina and I can run, as the hew-mons say, "like the wind"
Personality
I am adventurous, upstanding, and somewhat talkative. My sense of humor often raises crew morale.
**Addendum, Psychological Evaluator Tigan, Stardate 50113.2: Ensign Dovan's "sense of humor" carries a sharp edge to it. Advise any future XO/COs to keep a close eye on it. However, comrades insist rather strongly that he drops every pretense when the situation calls for it. As demonstrated by the attitude he displayed both in my session with him and by the flippant character of his personal profile, I find it difficult to believe.
**Addendum, Psych Evaluator Shasta, Stardate 54648.0: Obviously, Ensign Dovan has more than proven himself in high-stress situations. However, as Ensign Tigan noted, his behavior outside war zones leaves much to be desired.
Family
Bolian family units involve no less than three spouses, and the most important aesthetic characteristic in a potential mate is his or her fertility. I'll just say that I have 46 brothers and sisters, with another on the way, and leave it at that. I've thought about getting married, but it would be such a bother. Childbearing age for Bolian women extends well into senescence, so I can have my sons after I've retired from the Fleet.
Interests, Skills, and Languages
I've played Strategema with a Grand Master, Kal-Toh with a Vulcan, and have a deep affection for the human game of Cricket, as well as the rough Bolian equivalent, Shel'nak'foren. Of course, SNF involves mind-orbs. But we won't go into that.
I'm a good pilot, but a better complainer. The real reason I've made it this far is that I apparently turn into a really good leader under pressure. Win a few medals and the new CO's stop requesting interviews before they bring you aboard. Then they spend the next five months trying to get you and your somewhat rebellious sense of humor back off.
I'm not all that cosmopolitan (or, rather, cosmocosmitan), but I have a strange delight in sampling other species' food. My few friends call it gluttony. I call it cultural awareness.
Awards:
Starfleet Wound Decoration with Enemy Action Palms (four occasions)
Grankite Order of Tactics (2371)
Starfleet Citation for Conspicuous Gallantry (2371)
Medal of Honor (2374)
Medal of Valor (2374)
Christopher Pike Legion of Honor (2375)
Knighted in the Legion of Bolias (2375)
Commendation for Original Thinking (2375)
Most highly decorated officer in Starfleet holding rank of LTCDMR or lower (2377, 2380-Present)
Languages: Federation Standard and Latin. Don't ask. Secondary school galactic language requirement on Gault. Nice place, but boring as a rock. Which it was. I played on the soccer team. But, anyhow, I thought the declensions looked cooler than learning native Bolian.
Biography
Here's the thing: Gault stinks. You know the saying, "It was a nice visit, but I wouldn't want to live there?" Well, I lived there. And it's not even a very nice place to visit. The main tourist attraction on the entire planet is the Paul Bunyan statue they built in their cleverly-named capitol city, Capitol City. The place drove me nuts. So did my family, but not as much.
You'd have thought that, with forty siblings at any one time, I would have been allowed to go my own way once I was out of secondary school. That way being Off Gault. It didn't much matter where. I would have joined the Nyberrite Alliance if that would have gotten me off-world. Sadly, all my parents wanted me to stay on the Family Farm. I don't know why. So I tried to make it work. I tried to make it work until I reached what for Bolians is considered marriage age (about 50 in Terran years). I needed to leave home.
Unfortunately for my parents' peace of mind, my version of "leaving home" did not necessarily involve wives. It didn't even involve one wife. I joined Starfleet, lured by the promise of unravelling the mysteries of the stars. Trust me: you never want to unravel some mysteries so much as you do after you have read every single hardcover book on your home planet.
So I went to the Academy. Just as I was preparing for my first posting, the Enterprise was off in System J-25 meeting the Borg for the first time. Which pretty much meant, as you can already tell, that my entire career would involve not so much exploration of outer space a series of explorations of the interior cavity of a (pick one: Borg/Klingon/Cardassian/Jem'Hadar) after (pick one: he/she) has been blown open by a(n) (pick one: phaser/disrupter/tricoder/especially pointy stick).
In some ways, though, I did get lucky. I was assigned to the USS Endeavor a few months before Wolf 359. Yes, I served under Captain Amasov. He taught me more than Starfleet Academy had in four years and than Gault had taught me in fifty. Those were good days. I was gamma-shift Flight Control Officer, and, since, in his old age, Captain was a bit of an insomniac, we had a good deal of time to talk.
At Wolf 359, most of the senior staff was killed. I wasn't piloting, but I did get to participate in fending off the Borg legions as they beamed aboard and started assimilating things. We were one of the only ships to succeed, but it came at a high price. Every security officer above the rank of Ensign was KIA or POW. Of course, where the Borg are concerned, POW might as well be KIA. But who am I to correct the vaunted Starfleet Casualty Classification System and its loyal bureaucrats serving the fleet's vital functions in the back lines?
Sometimes I think that, between their pointless and rather irritating episodes of senseless, violent rage, the Klingons are really on to something. For one, their leaders kill bureaucrats whenever they get the chance. Ours increase their funding.
The Endeavor was lucky. Of the forty ships that entered combat, thirty-nine lost their captains, and thirty-nine were destroyed. Endeavor was the sole exception in both cases. It scarred us all, though, and crippled the Endeavor in her prime. With most of the senior staff dead and Captain Amasov getting up in years, Starfleet did a few weeks' repair and reassigned her as a training ship. Perhaps it was the tens of millions of Wolf 359's extra little consequences, like the striking down of a good ship in her golden years, that, added to the 11,000 dead the Borg left in their wake, led Captain to go down in the history books saying, "It is my opinion that the Borg are as close to pure evil as any race we've ever encountered."
So began my Time of Bouncing. Though he saved me from the fate of Endeavor by transferring me away—over my protests—Captain Amasov had little more than his personal recommendation to recommend me to other CO's. And I did little to impress them. I'm told that I have a bit too much of a sense of humor for my own good. When I was assigned to the T'Kumbra, the Vulcan ship, I rubbed Captain Solok the wrong way. Same with Captain Emick (USS Intrepid), Captain Ross (USS Bellerophon), Commander Dogface—I mean, Robinson (USS Merrimack), and, until I had been their a while, Captain Livok (CSS Virginia). I wore Livok down with Kal-Toh, though. He had never seen a Bolian who could play the game with any focus.
Unfortunately, the Virginia blew up. I saved… well, most of the people on my deck, actually, but I didn't have any direct involvement with the accident. And I think calling an attack by a two hundred year-old Romulan mine "enemy action" in the award citation was something of a stretch. Anyhow, the details are all on file. The important fact is that not a single person died, and the relevant fact is that I was promoted. When the Virginia exploded, I was on the verge of breaking my record of 481 days serving continuously on the same starship. I only reached 467.
Some naïve personnel officer in the Bajor Sector saw my record (read: medals) and requested me. I ended up next on the Defiant, where I entertained Commander Worf by swapping stories with him about Gault. How, you ask, do I know he was entertained? He chose not to rip out my throat. Of course, to be fair, he didn't have much time before I realized that I had to get back to my career path of Being On Starships When They Explode. Given a few more weeks, I'm sure he would have snapped. I managed to be on shore leave during most of the major Klingon and early Dominion engagements, but the Borg incursion of 2371 served as a pleasant reminder to me that life in Starfleet was rather difficult at times. The Borg caught us in a tractor beam, so I used our tractor beam to slam the debris of my best friend's vessel into the emitter. Won a Grankite for it. I was recommended for a promotion, but the bureaucrats turned it down, saying I needed to be a Lieutenant for a few more years before I could move up the line. The impact of the Dominion War and the vast demand for officers were yet to be felt.
Meanwhile, I tried to tone things down, maybe make some friends on a ship that had a decent chance of surviving for two or three years. So I picked the Centaur, which was the first in a relatively new ship class, and was performing stellar surveys and cultural observations in charted, unexplored space. Technically, we were also patrolling the Core Worlds, since the Klingon-Federation War had just broken out. Captain Urason felt bad that his beta-shift helm officer had more medals than he did, so he tried to get us assigned to the front, but Starfleet felt that there needed to be at least one top-of-the-line, recently-constructed ship in the vicinity of Sector 001, in case something came up. I was very happy with this. So I was rather surprised to find myself, within a few months, as Beta Shift Flight Control Officer on Wing Alpha, Vessel 4 of the Tenth Fleet. Fortunately, since Fleet 10's job was to patrol some of the more vulnerable Core Worlds, I thought I was pretty much safe from the incipient Dominion War.
We were on a training exercise just a light-year away when the Dominion attacked Betazed.
We didn't stand a bat's chance in Gre'thor. The fight lasted ten hours, and only in the last forty minutes did the main force of either side engage each other directly. I made a mistake that nearly gave away our position, which would have given their superior force the opportunity to attack us and push us back halfway to Vulcan. I would have within about a minute, too, if the helmsman on the Zeus hadn't spared me the disgrace by doing it himself. The Dominion force attacked us and pushed us back halfway to Vulcan. Unfortunately, no one had the modesty to demote me for the mistake I had been about to make; punishment was reserved for the boy who had actually done it. It was wartime; Starfleet was much more interested in giving medals out than taking them away. That's morale for you.
So, during the battle, when the Centaur was blasted into a barely space-worthy pulp, along with another twenty percent of the fleet, we were boarded by Jem'Hadar. I got my arm blown off, and so earned my third Starfleet Wound Decoration with Enemy Action Palms. To use the long name. Once again, my captain was dead, and the Centaur had long since lost its XO and Second Officer to commands in the Seventh Fleet, so I was left as the first officer to our Beta-Shift Tac Officer, the new Acting Captain. He and I fought our way to Engineering with the stated goal of establishing a new command post there, but we both knew what had to be done. The Centaur-class ship was one of a very small number of designs that hadn't been compromised by Dominion forces. So, as the Jem'Hadar continued to swarm the ship, overwhelming every security force, Lt. Klein held the door while I signalled the fleet to run for it and overloaded the warp core.
So far as I know, discounting the ten of us who were rescued (Lt. Klein was seriously wounded in the engine room and gave up his tranporter lock to an ensign more likely to survive), we left exactly five hundred and seventy-four men and women behind on the Centaur. Its detonation took three barely-shielded Jem'Hadar fighters with it, and knocked seven more out of the fight. I stared out the window of the Tranquility's medical bay as we zoomed away from the wreckage. I'd like to give my personal commendation to Dr. Ypac'K'sharee of the Tranquility, if my commendation counts for anything, for excellence in the fields of medicine, counseling and drinkmixing, which often go together. I've never felt so close to a member of a species whose name I couldn't pronounce.
I recuperated for the next few months, but, since the mysteries of the universe weren't holding too much allure for me at the time, I got myself shipped to the front as quickly as possible with the goal of killing Jem'Hadar. I got the post of Chief Flight Control Officer on the Tokyo just in time for the First Battle of Chin'toka, which was notable in my life chiefly for the fact that the ship I was on did not explode, and not a single person on the bridge died. We held Chin'toka for the rest of the year.
The Dominion, in its infinite wisdom, picked the exactly one time out of the entire next year that I was in a shuttlecraft as the perfect time for their attack. I was with two green security officers and a Klingon diplomatic observer. Then the Breen showed up, energy dampeners blazing. It's really rather a long story, but, once the Tokyo lost communications, I started acting independently. We found a weak point in a bugship's shields, punched through, beamed into the armory, and fought our way to the bridge. By this point, of course, Chin'toka is long gone. All we're doing is trying to help stop the retreat from becoming a rout. Or, rather, stop a rout from becoming a massacre. We took one casualty taking the bridge, an Ensign Sitorax, who was badly wounded in the chest, and the Klingon took a nasty-looking head wound, but we were able to take control of the ship, which, after thinking for roughly a nanosecond, we rechristened IKS Suicidal Insanity. I'm not sure why Korgon let us do that. I think it was the head wound. Furthermore, Korgon being a rather high-level diplomat with very little chance to get to know me, I was granted a battlefield commission as a captain in the Klingon Defense Force. I am willing to bet that I'm the only officer in Starfleet whose Starfleet rank is lower than his Klingon rank. I've never really had the opportunity to take advantage of my other commission, but I did cut the requisite number of proofs of purchases out of the sides of cereal boxes and send away for the pips, with Korgon's name attached, and, without any other paperwork, the whole thing came through. I checked the computer a few weeks later and was rather surprised to find that I suddenly had access to the Klingon Defense Database. Sadly, since Starfleet terminals are not exactly secure download sites, I'm only able to access information that has already been shared with our top brass. So I don't check in too often.
Anyhow, I was now the first officer to Ambassador Korgon aboard the IKS Suicidal Insanity. You'd be amazed how slow the Jem'Hadar are on the uptake. We took out about four ships before they noticed that we were out of formation. They panicked, overreacted, and sent an entire wing of Breen and Jem'Hadar fighters after us. So we tore them as far off course as possible, effectively removing them from the pursuit. We then executed a textbook Yainec Overload, which was pioneered by Septak Yainec during the Broken Star Incident as a way to increase the yield of a detonating warp core by a factor of about ten. It takes time, but we were able to both adapt it for the Jem'Hadar warp core and survive long enough for the antimatter to build up to sufficient levels. I have not and will never divulge the precise details of the minutes immediately prior to detonation, but I will say that I and the unwounded ensign transported back to the runabout. We raised rear shields to maximum and rode the shockwave—-well, actually, it was more like being ridden by the shockwave-—back to the edge of Dominion space, where we drifted until Starbase 271 detected us and sent out a rescue vessel. The Dominion attack wing had not been annihilated, but the distraction had been enough to allow three or four stragglers, the Tokyo among them, to escape the battlefield. Captain Kellan, a man with whom I have never seen eye-to-eye, was rather stunned, and recommended me for immediate promotion to the rank of captain. That and just about everything else in the Starfleet bureaucratic machine were put on hold until after the final attack on Cardassia, however.
Unfortunately, filling in as First Officer and at the same time running the CONN (like everyone else, we were spread very thin by the end of the war), I was a bit bitter, way too cocky, and more than a bit insubordinate. I disobeyed a direct order, took the ship to the end of the battlefield opposite where we were supposed to be, and left the Captain quite speechless. The only reason I wasn't drummed out of Starfleet with a dishonorable discharge and a year's worth of psychiatric evaluations was that I did it to respond to the Romulan flagship's desperate cry for help, and it was hard for Starfleet to make a public scene about an officer rescuing his Romulan allies from certain death. In fact, Captain Kellan and I each ended up with a commendation for it. They made it a Commendation for Original Thinking instead of Heroism, though, as a sly way of telling us what they really thought about our…original… behavior. Needless to say, my command recommendation was abruptly turned down, and Captain Kellan was chagrined to find himself stuck with snarky little me, the officer he had nicknamed "Blue Devil," after some obscure sports team he particularly hated, as his first officer.
It figured, then, that the Tokyo would be the first and only ship on which I served for a period exceeding two years.
Four years, actually. Reconstruction. Aid convoys to Cardassia, supply depot repairs, ferrying the Starfleet Corps of Engineers to and fro, and, on very rare occasions, the chance to scan an archaeological ruin or probe a star as we passed it by on the way to the new brushfire we had to put out. I considered leaving the service, but the paperwork was too thick in the period immediately after the war, what with all the extended tours of duty ordered for the enlisted men, and, in 2378, I was finally promoted to Lt. Cmdr. (the bureaucrat who handled my application—-Inspector #98-—wrote on the paper copy, "I can't understand why you're not a captain yet!" And that's why medals should be abolished: they tell people like Inspector #98 that people like me could measure up to people like Captain Amasov when people like me are lucky to stand in the same room with people like him), and, with that, the Tokyo was sent on a two-year exploration/patrol of the borders of the Tzenkethi Coalition. And, since most of their border is bounded by unclaimed, uncharted space, we had a lot of latitude. A lot of fun stuff happened on that trip, and, even though I didn't win any medals (perhaps because of it), I was satisfied. Leading away teams is a whole barrel of risky joy, and, in month seventeen, I finally beat T'Pen in Kal-Toh. So satisfied, and hoping to avoid the aftermath of the Shinzon Affair, which, in 2380, looked like it could boil over into a Romulan war, I tried to quit, but Captain Kellan—-who, after six years, still didn't like me all that much-—convinced me to take a leave of absence instead.
So I did. I moved back home. I entered the Bolian dating scene. I started a farm. Then I considered killing myself. As it turned out, Gault hadn't gotten any less boring since I had last been there. My parents were happy to see me, but that was the highlight of my leave. And that was on the second day. Of a two year stay. I very nearly got married, but I proved incompatible with Norin's other husbands.
I had my Starfleet commission reactivated in 2382. Having no interest any longer in the affairs of the Alpha Quadrant, I applied for admission in Task Force 38, the force assigned to Starfleet's "new frontier" that had been opened by the discovery of the Iconian super-gateway, and made it clear that I would accept any posting in TF38, and in no other force. This request has been granted; however, at this writing, the CO of the Excelsior-C, whatever her name is (I think it's a her) has been given discretion to place me in whatever position at whatever rank she decides. It seems TF38 is very much in demand, and, if I'm not willing to compromise, I might have to accept a rank reduction. Fine.
The Delta Quadrant is a wide new territory, and, while not the last, what with there still being 90% of the Beta Quadrant and 70% of the Alpha left to explore, DQ is definitely the largest of the our new frontiers. I'm out here because I want to see something wonderful. I want to see stars born. I want to make first contact. I want to beam down to an alien world and find the man who rules the universe, then have a word with him about why he does things the way he does. In short, ex astris mirificientia amplexare volo. I want to take wonder from the stars.
I knew that Latin would come in use some day.
Character Developed and Originated By: James Heaney
Character Art: John Hazard