Mike Ayres

Early Life and Starfleet Academy (2353-2380)

Michael Christopher Ayes was born on Aurorath Bay, a backwater Federation colony at the edge of charted space. It had been meant as a model of frontier self-sufficiency, but by the time Ayres was old enough to understand the world around him, the settlement was little more than a dust-choked afterthought, a place where Starfleet rarely visited and where the Federation’s high-minded ideals were eroded by the ruthless arithmetic of survival.

His father, a man of rigid principles, had come to the colony with the dream of building something that would stand apart from the decadence of Earth and the creeping influence of alien cultures. A harsh man, he believed that suffering bred strength and so he offered his son neither affection nor comfort. His mother, by contrast, was a gentle woman ill-suited for such a hard world. She was sorrowful but had decided there was no hope in discussing her depression. Both Ayres’ parents died when he was young, imparting on him a grief that settled over his attitude like the dust from the colony’s endless storms.

A youth in the custody of the weak colonial government, Ayres grew up wary and watchful, accustomed to the brutal necessity of grasping what he needed in life to survive. He became a restless teenager, drawn to the stars beyond the colony’s limits. He would sit for hours at night, watching the flickering lights of far-away freighters and wondering what lay beyond the dust and hardship of his lot.

One lucky day, lost in thought as he stared into the night sky, he met a young Starfleet officer. Ensign Eliza Griffiths was the most junior member of an away team tasked with providing aid to the colony – restoring what they could – or transport away for those who did not, or could not, remain in those harsh conditions. Griffiths took pity on the young man, providing him with food, clothing and shelter, and gradually persuading him to leave the colony for Earth.

By the time he set foot on a Starfleet vessel, he was already half a ghost, a young man shaped by dust and violence. He buried deep the kindness within him, with a flicker of hope – kept alive by the mentorship of Griffiths – that a life in Starfleet would prove that his negative instincts about the galaxy were misplaced.

After considerable cajoling and even more mentoring from Griffiths and her array of supportive friends, Ayres entered Starfleet Academy with the reluctant air of a young man walking into his own sentencing. His first months were spent in a state of weary detachment, enduring the rigid routine with the same grim resignation that had carried him through his childhood. He was neither insubordinate nor cooperative, maintaining the sort of detached compliance that infuriated instructors and baffled his peers. It was not until they put him in a cockpit that, much to his and his instructors’ surprise, he came alive.

The Academy flight instructors, accustomed to weeding out overconfident cadets with inflated self-assessments, were forced to admit that Ayres’ ability was exceptional. What others struggled to learn about flight, atmospheric or space, he understood implicitly. It did not make him less cynical, nor did it endear him to Starfleet’s endless moral posturing. But it did, in some small way, give him purpose. If he was to be shaped into something, if he was to be made useful, then at least it would be on his terms. By the time he graduated, there were those who spoke of him as a pilot of rare and unteachable talent. He, as ever, remained indifferent.

Deep Space 7 and the Triton’s Prize (2380-2388)

As a newly-commissioned ensign and flight control officer on Deep Space 7, on the edge of the Romulan Neutral Zone, Ayres made the most of the relative quiet to practice his piloting. It was on DS7 that he earned his callsign, Sundance. The callsign came from a night of ill-advised recreation, which had begun with a bottle of Romulan ale and ended, less predictably, with an impromptu dogfighting contest conducted through the asteroid belt that loomed at the station’s eastern perimeter. It was the result of a dare, one to which Ayres had agreed to not out of pride but because the alternative had been listening to a particularly loquacious ensign wax lyrical about his own imagined piloting prowess.

What had followed was something that would, had Starfleet Command been made fully aware of it, have resulted in immediate and irreversible disciplinary action. The station’s flight logs later described the incident in terms of ‘reckless manoeuvring’ and ‘insubordination’. His fellow pilots, however, described it rather differently. In the retelling, he had danced his way through the asteroids as though it were a thing choreographed, ducking and weaving in a pattern that suggested suicidal confidence or outright madness. One particularly enthusiastic witness back on the station, whose poetic and historic inclinations had been encouraged by drink, had likened it to “watching the Sundance Kid at the helm of an impulse drive”. The name stuck.

His next posting, six years on the Galaxy-class USS Triton’s Prize – with its extensive hangar bays and formidable array of shuttle craft and fighters – was an exciting opportunity to demonstrate his skills as a pilot. Their mission was straightforward: locate, intercept, and neutralise pirate activity along the corridors between Federation space and the chaotic fringe of the Orion Syndicate’s influence. The work was neither clean nor particularly glorious. Ayres, for his part, did not mind the work: it was a job with clear objectives, and no grand moral quandaries. Pirates were pirates. In the quiet determination of exercising his duties, particularly in the cockpit, he earned something of a reputation among the crew, half-respected and half-feared. He was not the sort of officer people sought out for camaraderie, but in the cockpit, there was no one better.

USS Lion (2388-2402)

The USS Lion, a Prometheus-class starship, was a warship in all but name. The Lion was assigned to the sort of difficult missions that Starfleet refused to formally categorise as warfare. Ayres was promoted and appointed as chief flight control officer, a duty of leadership that he resented. But the chance to be responsible for a Prometheus-class starship’s multi-vector assault mode was impossible for him to turn down.

The officers and crew in the Lion‘s flight department followed him, not because he inspired them, but because he knew how to survive. He understood the battlefield, the instincts of a pilot under fire, the razor-thin line between an acceptable risk and a waste of life. He spoke little, ordered only what was necessary, and led from the front. At first the crew whispered that he was reckless. Then they called him lucky. And finally, when enough missions had passed with an unexpected degree of success, he was offered promotion to be the Lion’s executive officer. What surprised Ayres the most was that he accepted.

First Captaincy and the Sacramento (2402-)

The fourteen years on the Lion had changed Ayres, even more so the six years as executive officer. And Starfleet Command had noted this. A California-class starship like the Sacramento may not be a grand warship or have a complement of fighters, but it represents a chance for Ayres to continue a journey to be more than an instrument and to earn the respect of his crew, task group, task force, and Bravo Fleet.