Maiek Khev
 Maiek Khev |
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Maiek Khev is a Romulan biologist and the creator of the virus that eradicated the Jaborrhik race during the Dominion War. The Federation considers him a war criminal and he remains one of that body's most wanted fugitives.
Biography
Maiek Khev was a respected, noble-born Romulan when the Dominion War began. He distinguished himself only slightly by siding with political allies and rivals by supporting a Federation alliance before the assassination of Senator Vreenak. His work was primarily academic; he was a lecturer and his research included standard work with viruses, prions, and pathogens. However, in the third month of the Federation-Klingon-Romulan Alliance, the Romulan Tal Shiar approached him with a proposition that at once horrified and excited him: The Tal Shiar revealed that they had been using his research to enhance their interrogation techniques with advanced biological and viral agents. Due to those successes, they hoped that he could help them with a problem. The Tal Shiar had discovered that the Dominion had pushed past Betazed and towards Sarasvati to a planet with a race of agrarian rock-miners, the Jaborrhik. The Jaborrhik were not yet capable of warp flight, or indeed space flight of any kind, but they were ferociously adapted to cut, drill, process, and eat a variety of silicates and fused carbon compounds. As the Federation later learned had been done to the Vorta, the Dominion's Founders intended to use genetic and technological manipulation to create a powerful race, a fierce and powerful one that they intended to replace the Jem'Hadar. The Tal Shiar did not intend to let them, and so they approached Khev about creating a virus to destroy the Jaborrhik before the Dominion could begin their manipulations.
Khev's virus was successful. The Jaborrhik race was exterminated. However, since both the Dominion's manipulation and the Tal Shiar's response had been top secret, the full extent of the incident was kept quiet until after the war ended. Once they were leaked, however, the Federation immediately protested the genocide and the Federation's president personally called for the immediate trial of the then-leader of the Tal Shiar project and of Maiek Khev. The project leader had since been killed and Maiek Khev quietly disappeared from sight. His picture and biodata were circulated throughout the Federation and the press dubbed him, somewhat poetically, "the inferno in which the Jaborrhik burned." The description was bastardized into his current honorific: the Infernal.