THE COLD WARRIORS

Interstellar Space, On Route to Starbase 11
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)
Stardate 2261.52 - Captain's Log

Have departed Talos Star Group, on route to specified coordinates as ordered. We've planned a twenty-four hour layover to resettle Talos colonists and survivors rescued from captivity. Location of Talos-IV colonist resettlements to remain confidential until further notice.

Latest bulletins suggest the Romulan offensive on Kronos has stalled, with indications of new combat actions near the outlying colonies supporting the defenders. Federation News Service is calling it the Siege of Kronos. Suffice to say, we are keeping apprised of the situation.

Attached: [Final report on operation at Talos-IV ]

Command Summary: The Talosian civilization is in a state of accelerated decline due to widespred overuse of psionic amplifiers that severely degrade their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Mister Spock estimates that without coordinated widespread intervention, the referenced sentient species will be effectively extinct within the next five to ten years. In anticipation of the designation of this planet as home to a Category Four Civilization, I endorse that recommendation wholeheartedly, with the additional recommendation that even in the event of their extinction, no Federation vessel should ever visit Talos-IV again. Additional notes include the events leading to the destruction of the planet Talos-VII and the destruction of an unidentified Dreadnought-class starship, believed to be USS Victory, in atmosphere of said planet. Whereabouts of Dreadnought USS Valiant are still undetermined.

End of Log

.

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)
Stardate 2261.52 - Captain's Personal Log

He's dead.

Garth of Izar. Hero of the Battle of Axanar. Greatest tactical mind Starfleet ever produced.

The man's maneuvers are required reading at the academy.

And I killed him.

The scary thing is, I don't even regret it. The crazy bastard tried to blow up a town just to cover up his own crimes and then tried to destroy the Enterprise to make sure there were no witness. This makes the second time in two years that Section Thirty One has tried to have me killed, and this time they sent a titan like Lloyd Garth to do their dirty work. All that tactical genius, and the man falls for a Cochrane Deceleration? I hope he rots in hell.

The bigger problem is the Klingon situation. I spent most of my life hearing about how the Klingons are the Federation's mortal enemy. About how they annihilated the Xyrillians for colonizing their space, about how they hunt Suliban for sport in the streets of Hakor. About how their warriors rampage across their protected space, raping and pillaging as they please. All my life hearing this: the Klingons are coming, the Klingons are coming, keep your phaser handy, there's Klingons out there. And then I think about people like Alex Marcus and Lloyd Garth and Khan Noonien Singh...

There are a lot of different people involved in this war, but it's a war with only two sides. On one side, there's Starfleet, and the Federation, and everyone who wants to work for the future. On the other side, there's Section Thirty One and the Tal'Shiar and everyone who stands to loose from peace. This war's been going on for a very long time, longer than anyone would ever believe. It's time that our side started fighting back.

.

- 0830 hours -
"The Klingons said they did it on purpose," Uhura said, looking at Kirk in disbelief, "That's what all the news reports said. That Praxis was deliberately exploded as part of a new burst of military spending. Nobody believes that of course, we all just assumed it was a massive industrial accident."

"They would claim responsibility," Kirk said, "If they admit it was an accident, it could be a sign of weakness. But if the Empire knew it was an act of sabotage, it would be all-out war."

"I'm not sure I believe this," Lieutenant Scott grumbled, "You're saying Federation operatives engineered the destruction of Praxis?"

"According to the Keeper, they only triggered it. But the chain reaction had to be set up first. Failsafes disabled, certain equipment inspections rescheduled at just the right time. Maybe a thousand things would have to go wrong at the same time for Praxis to have that kind of disaster. That's where the Talosians come in."

Spock nodded at this, looking at the PADD on the table in front of him, "The amplifier from Bo'Shan contains verifiable indexes to four hundred and eighty seven individuals, likely powerplant employees and mining officials. The Watcher's memory is selective at best, but his description of them is consistent with Klingon and Nausican phenotypes. It would appear they were programmed to sabotage the power network in very specific ways and then have no recollection of having done so afterwards."

"And nothing to trace it back to the Federation," Kirk said, "The saboteurs had no idea what was going on. Even if they were caught, there's nothing to link them to the Federation in any way."

"This changes things, doesn't it?" Sulu asked, "Praxis was their key energy production facility. Seventy percent of their domestic power consumption and ninety percent of their dilithium came from that moon."

"And without Praxis, the Empire's just a paper tiger. To say nothing of the environmental damage to Kronos itself. It's hard to say how bad they had it, but after Praxis the Empire can never seriously threaten the Federation again."

Uhura looked up suddenly, "And now the Romulan invasion..."

Kirk nodded, "It's definitely not a coincidence. And I don't think the Romulans are just being clever either. I think that Section Thirty One wants to make sure the Empire never has a chance to recover. They might even be directly supporting the invasion."

"Federation citizens supporting Romulans?" Sulu looked mortified, "That's just crazy."

Spock and Uhura traded a long, knowing glance. "There is a certain type of person who would find that cooperation useful."

"Great minds think alike," Kirk said, "So do sociopaths."

McCoy sat up at his end of the table, clearing his throat, "Sorry to break up this moralistic pity party, but aren't we looking at this the wrong way? I mean, the Klingon Empire is a military dictatorship supported by conquest and slave labor. They brutalize the planets they conquer. They've exterminated whole civilizations just to prove that they can. Maybe destroying Praxis isn't morally or legally acceptable, but isn't the Federation that much safer without the marauding horde massing on our doorstep?"

Lieutenant Scott nodded in agreement, "You have to consider how many lives were saved by demolishing that moon. Thousands of Starfleet officers who won't have to die in a pointless war, tens of thousands on the disputed planets..."

"Federation lives... Starfleet lives..." Doctor Marcus hadn't said a word until now, quiet as a mouse in a corner of the table between Chekov and Spock, "Do Klingon lives matter?"

The question stirred all of them in different ways. All of them shifted uncomfortably, some at the implication that they didn't, and some at the implication that they should. "Of course they matter," McCoy said, "But..."

"More than our security?" Marcus asked, "More than Federation interests? More than Federation supremacy? More, perhaps, than establishing regional dominance over the Klingons and even the Romulan Empire?"

Sulu asked, "Why should Klingon lives matter more than the Federation's security?"

"For the same reason Federation lives matter more than Klingon security," Marcus said, "We can afford to be secure without putting their lives at risk, and the same goes for them and anyone else we might be competing with. Now let me ask you this: how many people were on Praxis when it exploded? How many people on Kronos have died from the debris of that moon raining down out of orbit? How many are dying just from exposure to the elements, from starvation, from not having enough power to run the hospitals properly?"

"And that's all water under the bridge right now," Kirk said, nodding, "The real question is this: how many billions of people are dying right now because Section Thirty One made this invasion possible?"

McCoy took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose, like he was battling a sharp chest pain.

Scott leaned forward on his elbows, propping his chin on top of his thumbs, staring off into other times and other places.

"It's not just a faceless mass out there," Kirk went on, "Those are people. People with names and faces. People with mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. People with careers and dreams. People who reminisce about yesterday and look forward to tomorrow. People who are dying by the billions right now because of what Section Thirty One did to them. Gentlemen, I am no mood to split hairs about whether the ends justifies the means. There are people suffering right now because of this. And I've called this meeting because it's past time we did something about it."

Kirk's senior officers sat up a little bit straighter, all eyes focussed on him now. Even Scott lost the far-away look in his eyes and focussed back on the here-and-now.

"Section Thirty One is a problem," Kirk said, "Not just to us specifically, although the fact that this is the second time they've come gunning for us probably isn't a coincidence. I mean that they're a problem for the entire Federation. They see us being surrounded by extraordinary threats that require extraordinary measures to counteract. They think of themselves as the Federation's silent protectors. But they're not. They're just scared angry people who don't have the backbone to follow their own principles."

McCoy frowned, "We bend the rules often enough on this ship. Suppose sometimes we have to sacrifice our principles in order to protect them?"

"Then our principles are flawed. Simple as that."

"There's no way it's that simple! We believe in democracy but we don't take a vote on course corrections!"

"No. What we do is we follow the orders of our democratically elected leaders and the laws they pass as part of their function in the Federation government and United Earth. Because we believe in Earth, we believe in the Federation, and we're out here in space, exploring new worlds and seeking out new life and new civilizations because we believe the thing we represent is worth enriching, worth protecting, and most of all, worth sharing with the rest of the universe. How can we be all of that and be people who set up entire civilizations to get glassed by our sworn enemies?"

"We didn't do that," Sulu said, drumming his fingers on the table, "Section Thirty One did. They don't represent the Federation, we do."

"But they used Federation resources to do it," Chekov said, "And they're still doing it now. They claim to act on our behalf."

"And if we stand around and do nothing, we're just enabling them," Kirk went on, "I say screw that. Section Thirty One is a problem, we're going to solve it."

"Us?" McCoy said, gesturing around the table, "How are we supposed to do that?"

Kirk's skin turned to cast iron now. They had finally arrived at the purpose of this meeting. "Now hear this: effective immediately, every one of you have standing orders to gather information about the operations and assets of Section Thirty One. Mister Spock has data from the Talosian amplifier that we can use to generate some leads. All of you have your own personal resources, connections, friends, acquaintances. I want you to call in every favor, twist every arm, gather up any information you can. Keep this quiet, and keep it under the table. The people we're after like to hide in plain sight, and if they realize we're after them, we'll get a knife in the back as sure as Bones is crabby."

McCoy flinched and growled, "Hey!"

"Which, I think, is where I come in," Doctor Marcus said, already drawing their collective eyes, "As most of you know, my father was the most public face of Section Thirty One, and his demise brought the organization into the limelight. That connection makes me persona non grata among Thirty One's agents, which basically eliminates any access I might have had. On the other hand, they don't consider me compromised, or else this operation on Talos-IV would have been sanitized long before we got there."

"You have the inside scoop on Section Thirty One?" Uhura asked.

"My father gave me access to every project he oversaw. He even brought me in as a consultant for some of them. I know, for example, that every major starbase has a safehouse used by Section Thirty One operatives, and I know how to find them. There are also a few support stations on remote planets near Klingon space. New Pacifica, Drozana Three, Gamma Hydra Four, to name a few. Most of these are equipped with long-range transwarp beaming relays, and certainly other interesting equipment."

Spock asked, "Would these assets still be operational after their disavowal by Starfleet?"

"Those assets are Thirty One's foundation. We weren't part of Starfleet so much as... well, borrowing it."

"The word you're looking for is 'infiltrating,'" Kirk said sharply, "Which sort of goes to my original point."

"I realize that, Sir," Marcus said, nodding, "In which case, you can consider me a defector."

Kirk grinned at her, "Happy to. But here's the real question I think we need answering. Does Section Thirty One operate as a shadowy network of faceless informants, or is there some kind of infrastructure we can attack?"

"Neither and both," Marcus said, "They're split up into task forces that each focus on a specific objective. Each task force is made up of two or more cells, an each cell has multiple operatives that act independently. Even then, most of Thirty One's work is done by unwitting proxies, so you'll rarely find more than one or two operatives in any one place."

Kirk nodded, "They manipulate other people into doing their dirtywork."

"Just like the Admiral convinced you to charge into the neutral zone to kill Khan," Marcus nodded, "Nearly starting a war in the process. So you get the idea: most of Thirty One's work involves theatrics and misdirection, and most of their physical assets are just storehouses for their props. We can shut them down one by one, and Thirty One will just rebuild them somewhere else."

Spock said, "Then our targets must be the facilitators who support the field operations."

"That's a start, but we also have to consider the consequences of their public exposure. Until now, they could embed themselves in Starfleet or the United Earth Military and piggyback on our existing infrastructure. Now they have a dreadnought and at least two heavy cruisers, probably acting as a mobile command center. This is a cancer we're hunting, and now it's metastasized and more aggressive than ever. The only way we can fight this is if we find a way to destroy it faster than it can regenerate, even if that means cutting out healthy tissue the malignancy has attached to."

Doctor McCoy sat up suddenly, "Actually, that's an old cliche. The best way to fight cancer is with medical nanites programmed to recognize cancer cells and attack them directly. That's the modern way to do it, anyway. There's also immunostimulants that trick the body into destroying its own cancer cells, but that's a pretty painful way of-"

"You know what? I like your first option better." Kirk clasped his hands on the table, "Uhura, I want you send a series of discrete communiques. Mark them for commanding officers of the starships Hornet, Yorktown and Saratoga."

"Add the Lexington," Spock added, "She's just completed her shakedown cruise. Captain Robert Wesley in command."

"I know Bob Wesley. He's a 'speak softly and carry a big stick' kind of guy. I think he'll be down too."

"What am I telling them?" Uhura asked, "And how do I tell it to them while still being discrete?"

"Tell them to remember the good times at Pike's Peak and give them coordinates for..." he thought about it for a moment, "The Azure Nebula. That's close enough to our patrol routes that none of them will have to deviate too far."

"Pikes Peak?" The question was in her eyes.

"The captains of those ships," Kirk said, "Morgan Lefler, John Garrovick, Jose Mendez... they all have one thing in common."

Spock didn't wait for her to ask for clarity. "They were all proteges of Admiral Pike."

"And they were all in the room with us when Pike was killed," Kirk added, "They all know too well how dangerous Section Thirty One can be. They'll support us on this for sure."

"I can also call Boyce on the Concordia," McCoy added, "And Piper's on the Challenger now. I'm sure I can get them on board."

"I'd give Lieutenant Braxxim a call," Sulu added, "I heard he's stationed on Discovery now. We know he's trustworthy."

"Captain," Scott leaned forward, "You realize you're about to declare a private war against an entire organization of professional spies? That doesn't strike me as a wise thing to do."

Marcus nodded in agreement, "He is right. You're basically signing up to be a James Bond villain."

Kirk thought about this, then smiled, "I like it. Let's go with that."

McCoy rolled his eyes. "Why do you have to do everything the hard way?"

"No, I'm serious. Let's do the Bond Villain thing. We capture one of their operatives, put him in some kind of elaborate death trap he's sure to escape from somehow, and then gloatingly tell him our entire evil plan so that when he escapes, he goes and tells all of Section Thirty One what we're up to."

Scott came half out of his chair, "They'll come after us with everything they've got! Ninjas, battle drones, that flippin enormous dreadnought they've been hiding somewhere and god knows what else! They'll send their whole army after us and-" at the growing smirk on the Captain's face, Scott clammed up. He replayed his own outburst in his head and then his own grin matched his, "Yeah, alright then!"

"If we're really doing this," Uhura said, "We should consider the legal repercussions. We're on our own initiative to take down an entire espionage unit just because they don't like us. This could be construed as an act of treason."

Spock grunted thoughtfully, "I disagree. After all, Section Thirty One does not officially exist. Starfleet will be just as agnostic of its demise as it was of its various atrocities."

"We're doing this," Kirk said, "And we're doing it because it needs to be done. And I need to know that you're all on board with this."

Chekov tilted his head slightly, "Well, they did try to kill us twice."

"Three times," Sulu corrected, "If you include the torpedo thing as a separate incident."

McCoy hooted, "I totally forgot about that! They served us up to the Klingons with beans and rice."

"We're on board, Sir," Uhura said, and a round of nods from all around the table confirmed it. "Just say the word."

Kirk nodded back. "Assume internal communications are being tapped. There will be no open discussion or specific references to our 'special research project' except to and from myself or Mister Spock. We clear?" He looked around the table, meeting their glances. They were as ready as they would ever be, or at least they were pretending to be. There was nothing left to be said now. "Dismissed."

Captain Kirk's officers rose to their feet with a shared sense of solemn purpose, and Kirk could hear in his head what all of them must have been thinking. The gloves were off now and the flag was going up.

USS Enterprise was going to war.

.

Omega Leonis System
Praxis Belt, Kronos Orbit
1 Paxi, 1485

Kang knew it was just an affectation, some artistic touch of the developers who originally assembled the thing's personality matrix. He knew the Kor'Ah's onboard AI didn't actually feel emotion and wasn't capable of being excited. And yet the synthesized voice sounded positively mortified when the science sensors triggered its breaking maneuver and the system announced, "Brace for deceleration!"

He pressed his feet to the footpads of his command chair and pulled his restraints tight across his chest. It was, if anything, wishful thinking; if Kor'Ah collided with anything now, both he and the chair would be vaporized before either of them had a chance to experience any physical collisions. That thought was not exactly comforting right now, but Kang had been raised on a healthy diet of cynicism and an unhealthy lack of self-preservation instincts and now he was just along for the ride.

The viewscreen image showed the swirling orange warp tunnel effect beginning to collapse, then tapering to a point as if the universe were clenching its jaws in front of him. Then in a flash of light, the ship was back in normal space, and three billion tons of asteroid rubble were barreling towards it at a thousand meters per second.

"Aw tits!" He heard the screaming of his youthful pilot over the intercom as well as echoing through the compartment from somewhere behind him. The pilot house was in a raised compartment above and behind the bridge where the ship's pilot and navigators had a three hundred and sixty degree view around them, but at battle stations, when the ship seemed to be its smallest, Kang could hear the kid as if he was sitting right next to him.

And he sounded as if he'd just lost bladder control. Kang couldn't really blame him.

For his credit, the little whelp managed to bank the ship hard to port and then a lateral translation to clear the patch of debris that appeared in front of them. Kor'Ah was heavy for a battle cruiser, but a skilled pilot like Torg Ha'Tok knew how to make it dance.

G-forces piled on, and Kang felt himself being thrown around the bridge as Torg put the ship into another series of evasive maneuvers. He was dodging through something that Kang couldn't see on the monitor, either because the angles were wrong or because the ship was just moving that fast. In a few seconds, however, the ship seemed to steady down, and Torg finally announced on the intercom, "That was close! We're clear!"

Kang hit the controls on his command chair and switched to a navigational view. A three-dimensional image of the space around his ship showed their position now as well as their relative location in orbit of the homeworld. They had emerged in sublight just inside the ever-expanding debris field that had once been Qo'mos' largest moon. Despite the near miss on arrival, most of the fragments around them were spread thinly; the closest of them were almost a hundred kilometers away, and the only pieces of debris larger than a shuttlecraft were barely inside of weapons range. Behind him, the display showed the location of the other four cruisers in his formation: the Hor'Khan, the Negh'Var, the Mek'leth and the Ha'Sith. That all five of them had arrived in one piece was not totally surprising to Kang, but it was also a welcome relief.

"Are we secure here?" Kang asked, "Any enemy presence?"

Sensor monitoring stations ringed half the room on either side of his command chair; six different "lookouts" each monitoring a different set of detection instruments and compiling their results for the tactical officer, whose station dominated the center of the room directly behind the Captain's chair. "No sign of detection," said the Gunnery Sergeant there, in that deep rumbling voice that somehow managed to sound calm even when the man it belonged to was scared out of his mind. Like now, Kang suspected, considering what they had just warped into. "I am detecting scanner emissions, however," Sergeant Mogh added, "The Romulans may have noticed our deceleration maneuver."

"We expected that. It changes nothing. Do we have eyes on the target?"

Mogh started to answer this, but the question wasn't meant for him.

The ship's AI, in its function as both first officer and communications router, answered automatically, "Datalink received from Sai'et Jurai. Target location confirmed."

Kang's fists clenched automatically, his blood pumping faster. Jurai's intelligence was always accurate, so he wasn't really surprised. But Kang also knew that battles weren't decided by the quality of a warrior, but by the quality of a warrior's preparation. And his squadron was better prepared for this mission than they had been for anything in their lives. "Keep an eye out for it. Once we get a visual..."

"I have it, General!" one of the lookouts shouted from her console, "Romulan battleship, dead ahead!"

"Visual!"

Mogh put the optical track on the screen and the target vessel materialized in front of him.

Jurai had called it the Imperial Romulan Fleetship Kroy'Wen, and like most Romulan ships it was indeed painted like a giant bird of prey. Unlike most Romulan ships, however, the carrier was a massive starship, easily a kilometer long and built round a huge rectangular hull that Kang understood was primarily just a support structure for the ship's huge plasma cannon.

"That's our boy," Kang said, gripping the arm rests harder. That plasma cannon was the giveaway. The barrel of it ran the entire length of the ship beginning near its main drive core and ending in a the muzzle of a terrifying-looking cannon barrel. A ship very much like this had fired its main weapon at Ty'Gokor, destroying the entire station in a single blast, even with its deflector shield at full power. And two days ago this very vessel had descended to low altitude and fired that huge cannon on the city of Qu'Vat, reducing that city - and everything within twenty kellicams of it, including its twenty six million inhabitants - to a simmering lake of molten glass.

The battleship was powerful, but it was slow. General Kor's raiders had managed to cripple its warp drive in yesterday's operation, and Kang's mission was to finish the job they started. The Romulans had chosen this little hiding spot because they knew it was suicide for anyone to attack them there. And Kang had chosen to attack them there because the Romulans didn't expect their enemies to rush head-first into the jaws of death.

Silly greenbloods. They never learn.

"All ships, form up," he said, clicking the control on his arm rest, "They'll definitely have defenses in the area."

Sergeant Mogh asked, "Shall I arm the disruptors?"

"Not yet. Wait until we're in firing range." Kang toggled back to tactical display. The other four cruisers had pulled into a protective box formation around the Kor'ah, passive scanners searching the sky for threats. The Romulan battleship hung in the distance like a stormcloud on the horizon: far away, but still ominously close.

"We're closing in," Mogh said, "Range, five thousand kellicams."

"Steady as she goes," Kang said, "We'll only get one shot at this..."

"Targets, Sir!" one of the lookouts shouted, "Two Romulan warbirds off the starboard bow! They're painting us!"

"Take evasive action but keep us on course!"

The four escorting cruisers shifted their formation; Negh'Var and Ha'Sith moved back, powering their deflectors to build a strong screen ahead of their fleet. Hor'Khan and Mek'Leth moved further forward and both powered their phaser cannons instead, meeting the Romulan defenders head on. The two preybirds spread their formation slightly wider and opened fire together; Hor'Khan and Mek'Leth fired back, orange Klingon phaser pulses and green Romulan plasma bolts passing each other in space.

"Four thousand kellicams!" Mogh shouted.

"Steady on course," Kang said, "Continue on impulse power..."

Hor'Khan's main phasers let off a burst of fire and one of the Romulan warbirds glittered brightly, shields flaring brightly. The return fire seemed to thicken, as if the hit had somehow made the Romulans angrier. In a few moments Kang's battlecruisers passed the two attacking ships in space; Hor'Khan and Mek'Leth both turned to keep their main batteries trained on them, coasting as the other three cruisers accelerated behind them.

Two against two would have been excellent odds under normal circumstances; a Romulan bird of war was no match for a K'tinga-class battlecruiser even on its best of days. But the circumstances of this war were far from normal, and Romulan tactics were the most abnormal of all. Kang knew that by letting themselves get separated from the others, Hor'Khan and Mek'Leth had just cut stuck their heads directly into the jaws of a beast. He also knew their commanders knew this, that they wouldn't have made that mistake without a reason.

It had happened so many times before that Kang wasn't even surprised this time, and yet somehow it still filled him with dread: where two seconds ago had been an empty tactical display showing only five ships and a distant battleship far ahead of them, Kang's display now showed dozens of photon torpedoes converging on the Hor'Khan and the Mek'Leth, swarming them from all sides. The torpedoes that didn't register on sensors until seconds before impact, that had no observable launch points and no detectable guidance systems, torpedoes that the Romulan warbirds didn't even seem to have launchers for.

"Two thousand kellicams!" Mogh said, "Almost in range!"

The trailing cruisers began to fire their point defense batteries, then began evasive maneuvers. Kang forced himself to focus on the task at hand. Torg gave a cry of alarm even as the tactical display showed that three more warbirds had now appeared off the port bow, and Negh'Var and Ha'Sith were transferring power to their phaser cannons to engage them. And more of those mystery torpedoes were beginning to appear, this time directly in Kor'Ah's path...

"One thousand kellicams!" Mogh bellowed, "Twenty seconds to firing range!"

Hor'Khan began firing off its point defense batteries, swatting torpedoes from the skies in packs. It wasn't enough; Romulan weapons began diving into the battle cruiser, exploding against its shields and armor. The shields held, but the two Romulan warbirds it had moved to engage were now focussing their plasma cannons directly on it.

The warbirds still in front of him suddenly focussed their fire on the Negh'Var, ignoring the others. Plasma bolts slammed into Negh'Var's shields, buffeting the ship left and right along its path. Ha'Sith shifted positions in the formation, seemingly in a move to cover Negh'Var; an instant later, almost a dozen torpedoes all appeared on Kang's threat display, and all of these converged on Ha'Sith in a ripple of bright white detonations. The shields collapsed, Ha'Sith began to tumble, jackknife, and then finally snapped in half at the neck as its command module and drive sections spun away in opposite directions.

And yet, stubborn Ha'Sith continued to fight; the severed command module lit its secondary impulse engines and began to maneuver again, firing point defense phasers to try and clear a path through the torpedoes. The decapitated drive section did the same, albeit with far less control, until another crush of Romulan weapons swarmed around it and the drive section exploded.

"Sir," Mogh announced, suddenly deadpan, "In range."

"All power to weapons," Kang ordered, "Disruptors, fire!"

Two small missile silos in Kor'Ah's command module swung open like trap doors and each released a single, small, dagger-like projectile into space. The missiles zipped forward on overcharged impulse engines, glowing like meteorites until they reached a point less than fifty kilometers from the Romulan battleship. At that distance, each missile shattered into a dozen smaller components, and then each component lit a tiny engine of its own and sliced into the battleship even faster than the missile bus that had carried them. They impacted all at once or close to it, and detonations sent ripples of energy through the Romulan shields; those shields flickered and expanded and then vanished altogether.

Kang smiled fiercely. The new "disruptor" weapons did surprisingly little damage to the physical structure of starships, but they ate deflector shields for breakfast and computer circuitry for lunch and god help you if they landed too close to your warp drive. Kroy'Wen, now shieldless and crippled, was as good as his. "Get in close and finish it off!" Kang ordered.

The defending warbirds redoubled their efforts. Concentrated plasma fire struck down all around them and more torpedoes appeared in their path. Negh'Var fired its point defense batteries in a mad defensive barrage, then vanished behind a wall of plasma fire and flew apart at the seems. Further aft, a Ha'Sith's command module fired two pairs of disruptors at the pursing warbirds before a lucky plasma bolt slammed into its bridge and silenced it. The disruptor torpedoes both found their mark, showering one of the warbirds in a cloud of explosions to avenge their fallen launcher. The now shieldless and crippled warbird languished in space for a long moment until it wandered into the sights of the trailing cruisers, the amazingly still-intact Hor'Khan and Mek'Leth, both firing like mad from their main batteries as they tried to catch up with the rest of the mission. The crippled warbird detonated spectacularly, and its partner turned evasive as another salvo of disruptors began to converge around it.

Kang watched his point-defense phasers blast an entire spread of torpedoes out of the sky, watched the distance to the battleship dwindle, watched the details of that wretched war machine resolve to visibility to the naked eye. He watched until he could almost see the Romulan commander glowering at him from the ship's huge command tower.

And he watched as Kor'Ah's main phaser cannons opened fire and twin orange pulses of concentrated fire sliced deeply and repeatedly into the battleship's superstructure. The phaser blasts chipped away the outer hull like the bark of a tree and knocked huge, smoldering chunks out of its engineering section. Finally the phaser bolts struck something sufficiently important, seconds before Kor'Ah shot past at several dozen kilometers per second. Secondary explosions erupted along the flanks of the battleship, then a ripping wave of small ones along the main cannon's long barrel.

Then the battleship Kroy'Wen tore itself in half in a paroxysm of explosions.

"Got him!" Kang whooped, joined by celebratory shouts from the entire crew that terminated only seconds later when a barrage of plasma fire pounded their shields. Kor'Ah began to rock and jerk from the impacts before the pilot officer put the ship back into its serpentine evasive maneuvers. "Full impulse! Get us out of the debris field!"

"Yes! Sir!" The pilot was almost giddy with adrenaline overdose, but his movements were no less deft. Or daft, whatever the case may be; either way, Kor'Ah moved through the debris field in a fast, winding motion more like a guided missile than a piloted starship, exiting the combat zone with the speed and purposefulness that no Romulan warbird could hope to match. Within minutes they were at the edge of the Romulan weapons range, and minutes after that they were near the edge of the debris field itself, rising high above Kronos' equatorial plane. Kang's tactical display showed the Hor'Khan and the Mek'Leth coming up behind him, rejoining his formation smoothly and professionally.

"We're in the clear," the navigation officer announced, "Setting course for rendezvous point. Prepare for FTL in three... two... one..."

The electrogravitic fields that enwrapped the Kor'Ah suddenly piled on until the ship snapped forward as if loaded on a catapult. The warp field and the acceleration crushed all the radiation of the visible universe down to a collapsed spectrum: a bright orange tunnel of incandescence that faded to a deep angry red behind the ship and rose to a haunting violet directly ahead. There was a persistent legend among Klingon pilots that the warp distortion seen by a traveling ship contained the compressed light spectra from every star and planet in all of time and space compressed into a single swirling kaleidoscope of color; that if you pointed a telescope in the right direction and corrected for the immense red/blueshift and axial distortion, you could look across the cosmos and see yourself being born, or look in the opposite direction and see yourself die. Another legend said that if you jumped out of an airlock while the ship was at warp, the warp field distortion would catapult your body across time and space and there's no telling where or when you would end up.

Kang didn't believe in the legends, but they had inspired at least two of his favorite operas. By the time this war was over, the composers would have plenty of new material for inspiration.

"We have successfully exited the combat zone," Mogh reported from the strategic console, "Logged three kills. Two warbirds, one mission and one catastrophic. And one battleship, catastrophic kill. This at the cost of the cruisers Negh'Var and Ha'Sith."

That, Kang thought, was an acceptable trade. K'tingas like Kor'Ah were designed to be built - and if necessary, sacrificed - in huge numbers, but the Romulans only had a handful of battleships like the Kroy'Wen; the Empire could absorb these losses, but the Greenbloods could not. "Are we on course for the Rallying Point?"

"Yes Sir."

"Hail the Klothos."

Mogh transferred power to the ship's main antenna - the concave dome in the "chin" of the command module. For a few moments the big dish glowed fiery red as its internal electronics heated up, and then the subspace radio signal leapt from the bow of the Kor'Ah and reached across the heavens until it reached the waiting transciever of the Klingon battleship IKS Klothos.

General Kor's flagship, of course, was no K'tinga. The ultramodern Klingon battlewagon had been based on (more accurately, Kang knew, "inspired by") the otherworldly technology of the Romulan battleship Narada. It was massive, fast, and carried more firepower than half of the Imperial fleet on its own. It was also hideous; Kang thought the ship looked like some kind of sea creature that had been left out in the sun too long, and at sublight speeds it maneuvered like one too. For all its immense firepower, the Klothos was just a huge mobile weapons platform that settled its arguments through brute strength alone. In theory, it was more than a match for anything the Romulans could bring to a battle, but Kang also knew that twelve of these ships had been in orbit of Qo'Nos when the first attack came, and none of those were still in fighting shape now.

And with the ruins of a Romulan battleship lying in his wake now, the so-called 'Dreadnought age,' Kang reflected, seemed to be more fashion than function.

Sergeant Mogh announced, "Klothos is responding on the emergency channel."

Kang clenched his teeth. Emergency channel meant the rendezvous point had been compromised. The Romulans had either followed one of the other strike teams back to their anchorage, or their strangely omniscient intelligence services had pulled off yet another miracle. "On screen," he said, and directed his attention to the communications monitor directly below his tactical display.

Kor appeared there, visibly distracted by the fact that half of his command center was on fire and the other half was shaking violently around him as Klingon men and women scrambled both to keep the ship in the fight and keep it from blowing itself up in the process. "Zhai Ha'Lok," Kor said, stroking his mustache as calmly as if the pandemonium behind him was just business-as-usual, "You succeeded?"

"Three enemy kills, including the battleship. What is your situation? We can join the fight in twenty two minutes at..."

"That won't be necessary, General," Kor striked his mustache again, "I am detaching three battalions of infantry along with heavy armor and equipment. The Bortas, the Sami and the Alerai are providing escort. Rendezvous at these coordinates," Kor punched something into a keyboard out of view of the camera, "Then proceed at maximum warp to the Khitomer system."

"Khitomer..." Kang stared at Kor, watching him calmly stroke his mustache as the Romulans shot his flagship full of holes. Kor wasn't exactly a picture of mental health before the war, and now Kang genuinely believed the man had finally lost his mind. "What do I expect to find there?"

"Some new civilian shipyards, some under-developed cities and two or three million refugees."

Kang nodded, beginning to understand. If Kor was redeploying ships like this, it meant they were settling in for a longer campaign than Kang thought. If they were planning a war strategy that would drag out for the three to six months it took to build a new K'Tinga class battlecruiser, the situation must be dire indeed. "What's the rendezvous point after the escort mission?"

Something exploded through a bulkhead behind Kor, showering his command center with tumbling debris. Kor seemed not to notice, even as one of the officers in the frame behind him wailed in pain, clutching a shrapnel wound on his forehead. "There isn't one," Kor said, "Stay at Khitomer. I need you to defend that colony in case the Romulans go after Narendra Three or Hakori. You can consider that your new home port until further notice."

Kang almost couldn't believe his ears. "You're putting us on colony defense? What about re-taking the homeworld?"

"Kang," the older General stared at him thorough the screen, frowning, "Praxis is gone. Ty'Gokor is gone. The First City is gone. Old Hakor, Aram'sa, Krios... all gone. There is no homeworld left to retake, my friend. It is just an empty shell of a planet that soon will be incapable of supporting life."

"If that's the case, why have we been fighting so hard to lift this siege? Why not regroup and defend the survi-" Kang trailed off and his eyes widened as he realized, suddenly, that Kor had just ordered him to do exactly that.

"The Romulans didn't come here to topple the Empire," Kor went on, "They are here to exterminate the Klingon race. They are even bypassing military targets now to strike our population centers directly. As for me, I am out of the fight for now. Klothos is dead in space, no power, no weapons. If not for the huge mass of Klothos' hull soaking up their plasma fire, I would have been dead an hour ago."

"You are planning to evacuate at some point?" Kang asked.

"I'm waiting for the Romulans to get tired of shooting at us and try for a boarding action. I'd like to get some close-quarters action before I abandon ship. I do have a fallback position, if that's what you're asking. Don't concern yourself with me. My remaining forces will keep their attention focussed on Homestar, that will buy you some time to prepare for their onslaught. In the mean time, build up whatever forces you can, because when the Romulans are finished with us, you will be next."

"Qa'plah, General Kor. Fight well." Kang closed the channel, then thumbed the intercom switch for the pilot house. "Torg, we've been sent updated rendezvous coordinates."

"I have them, Sir. Shall I adjust course?"

"Yes. And once we make the rendezvous, set course for the Khitomer system at warp six."

"Khitomer, Sir? That's an independent colony, isn't it? Not part of the Empire."

Kang's stomach suddenly twisted into a knot as he tried to swallow those words. Not part of the Empire. He could not even be sure there was an Empire to not be part of; three quarters of the Klingon race still lived on Qo'Nos, and if the homeworld was beyond hope, what sort of empire was a sprawl of garrison towns, understaffed outposts and suburban retreats for wealthy nobles?

The Empire-in-name-only had given him his orders, though. Kang was not about to refuse them. "Our orders are to change that," he said officiously, "We'll be annexing the Khitomer planets in order to support the Klingon war effort!"

Sergeant Mogh added gently, "General, with only six cruisers and three battalions, we don't have the military strength to take a world that size. If the colonists don't cooperate..."

"For all intents and purposes, we are the Klingon Empire," Kang said, "We will follow normal imperial procedure, just like we always do, and claim that colony for the glory of the Empire"

"What if the colonists resist?"

Kang snorted a laugh, "Then the colony will claim us. It makes no difference to me. Kor has ordered me to protect that colony and that is exactly what I intend to do."

Star Trek: Exodus is a fan-fiction novella written by CrazyEddie (crazyeddie404 ). I hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

More to come in the series, so stay tuned! Reviews are encouraged, constructive criticism welcome!

- Crazy Eddie's Five Year Mission Series -

#1 Star Trek: Genesis

#2 Star Trek: Exodus

#3 Star Trek: Khitomer (Spring, 2016)

#4 Star Trek: Testament (Fall, 2016)