The Prime Directive is the most staggering atrocity - in sheer scope - ever to have been perpetrated by an advanced civilization.

In its name, genocides and mass enslavements are committed, planets are wrenched out of orbit into their suns or torn apart by supervolcanoes with millions or billions of innocents aboard, and literally uncounted numbers of men, women, and children fall prey to all manner of poverty, scarcity, illness, violence, disaster, and opportunity cost with every second that ticks by. Meanwhile, prosperous neighbors, concealing themselves like shy gods, leaving the little cousins to their deadly growth and winnowing, cheat themselves out of all the culture and insight and genius that they insist on abandoning to their noninterference policy.

Isabella T'Mir may feel more personal woe at the destruction of Vulcan than she does at the destruction of any other lost planet. But it turns out that the technology to kill billions often - routinely - appears before warp, even if the sheer drama of Vulcan's demise took more... sophistication. If she found that there were some entity who could have halted Nero, saved her father, saved the billions of others on the planet, and who stood back, because someone had not invented the correct widget - she would wish them all the misfortune she could imagine. And she has a good imagination.

Isabella's ship is named Prometheus. Plenty of people name their ships after ancient deities; hers is one of eight Prometheuses registered within the Federation, one of which is even - ironically - a Starfleet science vessel.

She means it a bit more literally.

What she does is illegal. (Officially, she is a surveyor; submitting her reports about the topography of planets and moons and the density and composition of asteroid fields is how she justifies her presence any which where she may turn up.) What she does would put her in prison on a deserted moon for life if she were ever found.

What she does is put the equations that lead to warp breakthrough on the desks of pre-warp scientists whose histories - scraped from primitive data nets - suggest that they might not be above plagiarism, and she conservatively estimates that she's saved twenty-one billion individuals from premature deaths (based on typical technological progressions, population demographics, her personal definition of "premature" as adjusted for the mortality of all discovered species, and the results of ensuing First Contact with affected civilizations) and billions more from living lives of ordinary length that simply happened to be impoverished by ignorance of the contents of the sky. These individuals were of nine species from six planets.

Occasionally she re-runs her estimation program and just stares at the numbers. When she is in danger of thinking too much about that deserted moon that she could fall into at any time. When she wonders if she really has any reason to think she is that much better than the Federation policymakers.

(The answer is: Yes. Yes she does. This reason comes in the form of an extremely large number that her computer will recalculate for her on command.)

The kind of planet she can interfere with is only the kind that has the preliminaries for warp. Starfleet won't touch them until they actually make the first jump, so they need to have access to the right materials, the underlying math, an adequate launch site. Much to her personal distress, some civilizations would, on contacting the Federation, predictably launch wars with them. These she leaves alone. She has others to visit, to pick up bits of their language so she can translate the warp-insights, to figure out how to covertly shuttle down to and infiltrate and leave her little presents. And she has to go other places - actually uninhabited systems; systems she knows are too primitive to plausibly take and run with her help far enough that the Federation can catch them on the other end of the run; systems that she just surveys and reports on and moves on from. To cover her tracks. Because she's been at this for two years, and that number representing what she's accomplished in that time is very large, and she could easily live to be a hundred and seventy, and there is such a lot of galaxy.

It's lonely, a little, sometimes, but Isabella's suited for prolonged solo trips through space. She has her shipboard library, updated regularly. She meditates, she writes, she studies.

She intercepts a distress call, out in the boondocks closer to Betazed than anywhere else and quite a distance from Betazed. This is a track-covering segment of her mission. There is no one around but her and even she doesn't really want to be there.

Isabella opens a channel.

"Distressed vessel, this is Captain Isabella T'Mir of the Prometheus. Please identify yourself and the nature of the problem."