Rank: Ensign
Position: Intelligence Officer

Born in 2349 on Earth into a Starfleet family, James Hough currently serves as Intelligence Officer aboard the USS Dauntless.

Hough's mother serves as a cultural liaison for Starfleet with several species of the Federation but most often with the Vulcans. To this day she hosts many envoys and trains diplomatic staff at Starfleet in cultural subtleties. As a result of his mother's vocation, Hough was exposed to Vulcan traditions and culture from a young age and has been known to show the Vulcan salute even when there are no Vulcans around, and he has been known to observe some Vulcan traditions without any need to do so.

Hough's father served in the Engineering corps specialising in power relay systems and would often be called off-planet for short contracts. During a project on Mars, installing new power control systems, a nearly catastrophic accident was averted and the engineering team was commended for their quick thinking and Hough's father was promoted to become an independent specialist outside of his former team. After a few more months of small contracts, Starfleet deployed him to a lead position in the project to expand the settlement on Galen IV. Hough's father arrived and began work on the settlement in 2357 but two months later the undefended colony was ruthlessly attacked by the Talarians and all Federation colonists were killed.  It was later discovered, by Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise, that one human child, Jeremiah Rossa, actually survived the attack but he was the only survivor.

Entering Starfleet Academy in 2366, Hough initially found it difficult to choose a specialisation, but was soon drawn to the College of Cryptography and Intelligence operations. At the college there was a long-standing challenge to decrypt a secret message that had a bit of a hiccup in 2367.  Even though the challenge has still not officially been won, the lecturer in cryptography found it unsettling when Hough suggested that he should have run a spell checking routine before encoding the message and spelt aloud a seemingly random, commonly misspelt word in front of the class. Apparently the suggestion was so unsettling that the message was hastily changed in that year, even though Hough did not claim to reveal any of the original message and the lecturer dismissed the incident as "antics and guesswork".

During his time in Cryptography he was approached by Harry Kim who was the editor of the school newspaper. Kim had a number of encrypted transmissions that he had detected in subspace which had originated from the Cardassian Demilitarised Zone. The priority identification and frequency of messages being sent indicated to Kim that he might be on to something but he didn't want to spend too much time on his own decrypting the messages because he felt there was a scoop he might miss out on. With the help of Hough they accessed the early reports of Marquis activity in the DMZ. Hough used the insight gained to write his final year essay on Marquis encryption techniques even though it was already out of date by the time it was published because of all the attention drawn to Kim's article.

On graduating from the Academy, the director of Intelligence operations at the Academy wrote of him the following; “Hough displays sufficient skills that any examiner would judge him to be a capable Intelligence Officer, but nothing more than capable. Judging by his history at the Academy, it is my opinion that he has carefully cultivated that image by revealing just enough of what he knows and no more. His final paper displays a thoroughness in intelligence gathering without revealing any greatly useful data. It is my opinion that he has learnt more at the Academy than he wishes to be know. In short, based on the way he cultivates this image, I believe he will be an excellent Intelligence Officer.”

Ensign Hough's first orders were to serve in Starfleet Intelligence at Starfleet headquarters.  After a few years, it was decided to put him into the fields and to serve aboard the USS Dauntless where he still serves as Intelligence Officer.

Rumours of Hough's death aboard the USS Dauntless at the hands of an unidentified alien being (who is said to have subsequently assumed his identity) are grossly exaggerated. During ... a complex series of events ... Hough was thought to be an imposter trying to gain access to the ship. But the rumour has no basis in reality as both the Medical staff and an investigation of the transporter pattern buffer confirmed he has not physically changed at all and subsequent memory tests confirmed he is no different to the way he was before the incident. Despite this evidence, a small number of conspiracy theorists (or “earthers”) doubt that the “current” Hough was even born on Earth.

Hough is said to have an obsession with gathering data on the Romulans. Even when he is not directly tasked with investigating the Romulans for Starfleet, it is thought that he does spends some of his personal time on this intelligence project. It is thought that this obsession is based on the old space-tale that the Romulans had faked a Federation communication to Galen IV in 2357 that was designed to be intercepted by the Talarians and to stoke their suspicions. This speculation has drawn some attention from Starfleet Intelligence, but a lack of appetite for engaging the technologically disadvantaged Talarians and the need to maintain the relatively stable situation with the Romulans has meant that Starfleet has officially distanced itself from any investigation in that area.