#cardassian war

[biblioflyer]

The Federation and "Bad" Peace

A defense of Federation non-interventionism and peace with morally icky entities.

The Cardassians circa the armistice with the Federation were known imperialists: enslaving the Bajorans, using brutal tactics to try to maintain their control in the face of an insurgency, and looting the planet of its natural resources leaving it ecologically damaged and sabotaging as much infrastructure as possible once they finally decided to withdraw.

The Cardassians perpetuated multiple atrocities against the Federation, killing noncombatants in events like the infamous Setlik III massacre.

The Cardassian Union is openly and directly governed by an unelected military command and a spy agency that use all of the classic tactics associated with descriptions like Stalinist to ensure their rule is unchallenged.

The Federation and the Cardassians fought a war over an indeterminate period in which millions were stated to have been killed. Its a bit hard to imagine this happening without a fairly hefty number of attacks on civilians or large scale ground force operations or both. Millions equates to thousands of Galaxy-class starships at a time when the "meta" of the series was that there were fewer than six Galaxy-class starships and the loss of 40 ships at Wolf 359 was a military disaster that was staggering. The point is that this number is hard to explain with just Dominion War style starship walls crashing into each other.

Given all of this heinousness, why doesn't the Federation just "do something" about the Cardassians?

I don't know what real world reference points the writers had in mind for the Cardassians. Prior to the Global War on Terror, a lot of fans seemed to be thinking of Iraq but in a shallow way: emphasizing the seeming vast chasm of capability between the two parties, but not stopping to think through why the original Gulf War coalition stopped short of trying to occupy Iraq and replace its government or why they would even permit Iraq to retain at least some military power.

For the fans for whom the virtue ethics argument that abstaining from war in the face of abjection outside of their borders isn't a selling point for the Federation, lets think through why the Federation would swallow a bitter pill:

One of the things we don't truly know is what the limits are of Federation power if it was fully and completely mobilized. The complete destruction of the Cardassian military down to the last security trooper who won't throw down his phaser doesn't seem impossible to fans who wonder why the Federation doesn't do just this, but it isn't ever established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Federation actually can muster the resources to do this.

Assuming it truly could, there is still a matter of material costs and moral risk.

Rip it out, root and stem

The most extreme scenario is the one I just described: the Federation extirpates the military, Obsidian Order, and anyone else who wants to point a phaser in the general direction of a gold shirt. The Federation takes over responsibility for the territorial defense of Cardassia against outside predation and for interior defense against looting, terrorism, and other crimes great and small until such time as indigenous security force and government can be established that the Federation feels like is 1. competent and 2. can be trusted. If the problem with the Cardassians is assumed to be innate to the Cardassians themselves, then this is the only solution available to the Federation: it will simply need to raise a generation or two of Cardassians who have never internalized the norms of the Union under the military and Obsidian Order and are fully assimilated to Federation values.

While the Federation is waiting for the Cardassians to assimilate to Federation habits of thought and behavior, every single day Federation security forces will be in situations where they will be making snap judgments about whether they need to protect themselves, who to believe in a petty dispute, and increasingly who to trust with responsibility and authority over their fellow citizens. And the Federation will morally and practically own the consequences of every decision. Make enough good decisions on balance and you end up with post World War 2 Japan and Germany in the end. Make enough bad decisions and you end up with Afghanistan and Iraq at the end of their respective occupations as part of the Global War on Terror.

Of course we want to believe that the morally enlightened and scientifically dominant Federation would make the best and most well informed choices. But what if this information dominance isn't enough? What if all that raw data when fed through Federation heuristics doesn't reliably spit out conclusions that fit neatly with Federation moral thinking? Or do it fast enough that a gold shirt manning a checkpoint knows whether that Cardassian approaching and ignoring orders to bring their hover craft to a complete stop is planning to ram the checkpoint or just drank too much kanar with a faulty universal translator?

Find a useful idiot to rule

Short of that extreme scenario above, there is the more common regime change option frequently exercised by great powers throughout history: kill everyone who doesn't agree that you are their suzerain and then find someone to personify a pretext of local rule. Then make that person responsible for implementing whatever reforms you desire. This is liable to fall well short of the moral preference of your average Trek fan. It doesn't feel good to replace one tyrant with another that's more amenable to your preferences while leaving literally everything else about the regime intact, at least for now.

I also don't see Federation citizens feeling like this was worth some portion of Starfleet waking up in a cold sweat reliving the moment they vaporized their first Cardassian trooper. A rather foundational experience that left deep scars on Miles O'Brien..who might also be, if I'm not mistaken, the first Starfleet character to profess to having been traumatized by killing in self defense.

Whether its ultimately selfish or not, I have begun to consider the possibility that at least one component of the Federation's preference for abstaining from wars of choice and trying to find an early off ramp when war comes to the Federation anyways, is that on some level, maybe even a very explicit level, it is understood that a familiarity with and comfort with the use of violence can erode utopia. Traumatized victims of violence from the predatory actions of neighbors and Starfleet officers who become conditioned to reflexively consider violence as a necessary tool before other options both represent a kind of social contagion that needs to be managed in a society that requires high levels of trust.

Prosperity in the context of Star Trek (as I think it does in our world) relies on a disinclination towards violence in order to ensure that more people can be trusted with Swiss army knife technologies that could easily be perverted into tools of destruction. Feeling safe and that peoples from wildly different cultural contexts reflexively prefer cooperation to "stranger danger" or zero sum competition. The end result is that the Federation quite obviously must protect its citizens and infrastructure from harm, but if it does so with unnecessary aggression it risks creating a culture where threat prevention and response get more and more loosely defined.

And as we've seen in the real world, sometimes you exchange one set of problems for a new set of much more disturbing and much more difficult to manage problems: such as exchanging a belligerent nation state ruled over by a brutal but fairly predictable tyrant for a hodgepodge of stateless militias willing to use suicide tactics and undertake ethnic cleansing.

With the Cardassians for instance, its not hard to imagine a situation where Obsidian Order and military remnants, finding no role for themselves in a post war society and with a long list of people that have deadly grievances with them, may wind up opting not to surrender and continue to wage an increasingly desperate and increasingly amoral insurgency and especially focusing on civilian casualties to demonstrate Federation and Cardassian successor state inability or unwillingness to provide for the safety of noncombatants.

Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should

One of the friction points I've experienced in the Star Trek fandom over the years is over the foreign policy of the Federation, especially between The Undiscovered Country and the Dominion War. The Federation gets dinged heavily by some fans for its many and problematic peace deals with known bad actors.

The Cardassians in particular are a recurring theme in large part because the Klingons and Romulans are understood to be polities of such power that while the Federation might prevail in direct conflict, that victory would taste like ashes. With the Cardassians, this has never really been explicitly communicated. They exist in an awkward position where they are clearly powerful enough that the Federation takes them seriously but on almost every occasion we see them confronted with a first rate starship like the Enterprise or the Nebula-class USS Phoenix, the Cardassians get clobbered and it doesn't even seem particularly close. Later, we'll see the Defiant rip through what we are led to presume are the best of the best of the Cardassian navy.

In the mind of a Trek fan who isn't really thinking things through all the way, this intrinsic weakness of the Cardassians when taken with their moral odiousness: their imperialism, their willingness to kill civilians, and commit other atrocities, their military dictatorship with a vicious police state, it turns a Trek fan into the Romulans of the Balance of Terror: arguing that the very weakness of another party is itself a moral reason to subjugate them. After all, it would be quick, easy, clean, and for the Cardassians' own good right? Right?

[curator-on-ao3]

Hooray! The Fall 2021 Star Trek Quarterly is live on Facebook and WordPress with content including the third of five (heh) chapters of my Janeway and O’Brien friendship fanfic, War Torn, with an absolutely gorgeous illustration by @regionalpancake. If you’re interested, I hope you enjoy the issue. 🎉

[biblioflyer]

The Cardassian War was worse than you probably think.

I wrote a lot about the Maquis with every intention of posting quite a bit more about it, but then I got cold feet. Its actually been a while since I watched some of the critical Maquis episodes. In some instances, I haven't seen them since they aired. So I decided to go back and rewatch some of them. I started with TNG 7x20 "Journey's End." Where I expected a very strident lecture on the evils of forced relocation, I found something deeply nuanced and something that also reframed how I understood the Federation's conflict with the Cardassians.

If you're in a hurry, the big revelation was that, per Picard, millions of people died in the Cardassian - Federation War.

If you haven't been part of debates about what the scale of the Star Trek setting is or are more attuned to more recent series, millions may not actually seem that many people. Star Wars and 40k fans are probably squinting and wondering what all the fuss is about.

So let me provide some additional context. This is going to be mostly Doylist in nature, i.e. "meta" commentary.

Millions of people equals thousands of Galaxy-class starships. At a time when we'd seen not more than two Galaxy-class starships on screen at the same time and per the Next Generation Technical Manual (which was quasi-canon at the time, essentially given high regard by creatives working on Trek but always subject to being overruled if the needs of the story dictated) there could be as few as five Galaxy-class starships active at the time, but perhaps eleven including the initial batch of six and assuming the six framed out but not completed hulls were built to completion and subtracting poor Yamato.

Just a few seasons before, the loss of 39 ships and 11,000 personnel at Wolf 359 was considered a pretty devastating loss.

If it were strictly Starfleet and Cardassian military personnel, millions would be staggering losses representing the equivalent of thousands of starships or some mix of ships and major stations or ground forces. My gut tells me that given the way TNG seems to be a smaller scale setting than Trek would later be depicted, this wasn't intended to be solely military losses but also inclusive of and maybe even disproportionately falling upon civilians. Given that the Federation doesn't directly target civilians as a general rule, I do have some theories on how this might come about: namely by making space warfare messier than its generally presented: Star Wars and The Expanse have both done great representation of how conflicts that play out in space can still result in collateral damage to civilian stations and planetary settlements.

Notably, later series like DS9 and Discovery will do a "soft" retcon of Starfleet to include as many as 7,000 ships in the 23rd century and perhaps around 30,000 in the 24th century (citation: Ron Moore & extrapolation based on fleet size quotes) but while this isn't a hard retcon in that it doesn't override firmly declared facts and figures, it also doesn't seem like these larger numbers were ones TNG was operating with when it threw a mere 40 ships at the Borg or had Starfleet yet again being unable to avoid pulling ships out of dock mid-refit and stuffing Enterprise crew on them to catch the Romulans smuggling arms to House Duras.

Regardless of how the numbers breakdown, this was anything but analogous to a protracted series of border skirmishes and raids ala the colonial theaters of various European imperial wars, which full disclosure, was my working mental model for understanding this conflict.

So why does this matter for understanding the Maquis?

I think it matters for understanding the Federation's motives in signing what most fans and many in universe characters feel is a "bad" peace with the Cardassians. This wasn't a vanity war that super powers sometimes find themselves in where they'll fight for years in some corner of the globe that is strategically irrelevant to the imperial heartland but has somehow gained incredible psychological significance in the minds of defense planners, politicians, and yellow journalists. This is a conflict that cost the Federation quite a bit of blood for planets that are described as having been settled for at most a few decades and, at the very least, we've never really heard anyone from the Federation complain about a lack of satisfactory M-class planets.

Of course as represented by the North American Indians (TNG's term, not mine) that had settled on Dorvan V, from the perspective of the colonists, they had roots and distinctive cultural identities that they desired to have respected and felt warranted their own planets. From the Federation's perspective, these are people who have barely settled their worlds and one world should be as good as another. If you run the numbers through "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" then this starts looking even more tilted towards the Federation's perspective.

Now the counter argument is the bog standard opposition to authoritarianism and violent revisionists argument. This is the argument that the moral responsibility for avoiding catastrophic loss of life is on the one who is the first to use violence to try to advance their interests, at least at the level of astropolitics. In this framing it is not the responsibility of the Federation to mollify the Cardassians by conceding on irrational fears or immoral demands.

A cynical reading of this argument might find within it the notion that the Federation should just do what it wants, as long as its consistent with the Federation's values, and if the Cardassians have a problem with it up to the point of attacking, then the Federation should fight back and not stop until it reaches Cardassia and overthrows the military junta in charge or at the very least, removes any Cardassian presence from Federation borders and denudes Cardassian capacity to strike across the border.

The idea here being that conceding to the Cardassians rewards them for their willingness to use violence to achieve their goals, which further incentivizes them to use violence, and arguably did incentivize them to use violence as evidenced by accusations of poisoning wells and damaging infrastructure to drive ex-Federation citizens off the worlds that were ceded to the Cardassian Union.

But this argument has always contained within it the implicit assumption that the Federation had the capacity to rollback Cardassian warmaking capability and to keep up pressure on the Cardassians until the Cardassians cry uncle. A war in which millions died and where the Federation is trading away planets is not one that seems to imply the Federation had the capacity to hammer the Cardassians until they relented or there was a deficit of will to fight this war to the hilt, recognizing that pushing the war all the way to the orbit of Cardassia Prime would result in Union space being ungoverned and insecure until the infrastructure and ships were replaced.

Anyone who has watched the outcomes of the Global War on Terror or the various civil wars and revolutions that have happened in recent years should be very cognizant that a lack of order and security often results in problems being exported to adjacent regions. Problems meaning traumatized and impoverished refugees seeking safety and sustenance in places ill equipped to provide for them materially and often with some or a lot of mutual incoherence and mistrust happening at the cultural level as norms clash. Problems also meaning unaccounted for military equipment finding its way into the hands of revolutionaries, terrorists, and pirates who pursue their own goals and survival needs through the use of weapons on anyone who has something worth taking.

The United States did not kill a million or more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other MENA region countries through the use of weapons from 2001 to date. Iraq from 1991 to 2001 didn't have a million excess deaths* because of bombs detonating in people's homes, those deaths resulted from damage to infrastructure and internal supply chains because civilization is actually rather fragile and even people we regard as "less developed" are not meaningfully closer to nature and more resilient than we in the WEIRD category. If anything they exist in a more delicate state because they are often living on more marginal and stressed land with infrastructure that lacks redundancies or substantial state capacity to move people and resources around quickly to address sudden need.

*It should be noted that while these figures are widely quoted, the methodology has been questioned. I would encourage readers who want to get their historical facts correct to examine the evidence and decide whether Iraq sanctions are something one wants to use in a context other than describing the potential consequences of a fictional war.

When considering how to deal with Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, there are moral debates about how hard to press the civilian economy. Namely because so much of the infrastructure and daily necessities of life in modern countries count as "dual use." As in there are legitimate civilian uses that it doesn't seem productive to deny people: transistors are essential for access to information - both state controlled but also outside channels, and operate everything from thermostats to live saving medical equipment. The distinction between a transistor appropriate for running an insulin pump and one for a hypersonic missile is increasingly blurry.

An analogy could easily be drawn to isolinear chips and replicators. We in the fandom often assume that the Federation's ability to be precise in its application of lethal violence is practically omniscient and omnipotent, and that with its august technology, it has been liberated from having to make hard decisions. Yet if the Federation wants to destroy the warmaking capability of the Cardassians, how "deep" into the Cardassian infrastructure does it need to go?

Can you imagine Captain Picard sleeping well at night after calling a senior staff meeting to debate the legitimacy of striking a fusion reactor in a dense urban area that has been unplugged from the civilian grid and hooked up to an industrial replicator pumping out photon torpedo thrusters?

Further, the moral and political science assumptions of the Federation seem to rule out the idea that Cardassian civilians suffering and dying is an appropriate form of justice for Federation lives nor does suffering seem to predictably and reliably lead to revolution. Historical evidence is at best mixed and perhaps even damning. Try wrapping your head around the idea that Russian forces continued to fight their foreign enemies in WW1 at the same time as different Russian formations were fighting each other during the civil war that broke out as a direct consequence of World War 1. In short, while the war had certainly radicalized much of the public, there was still a lot of anger and blame directed to those who had been killing Russians before Russians were killing Russians.

So what is the Federation to do?

Keep fighting a war it probably wasn't technically losing but definitely didn't seem to be winning?

And perhaps the Federation couldn't win without paying a cost in both Federation and Cardassian lives, many of whom might be noncombatants, that was unpalatable?

What was it supposed to do after Wolf 359?

Postscript:

A bit more about the plot of the episode itself. "Journey's End" is probably one of the best TNG moral dilemma episodes. There are critiques to be made obviously. That the Indigenous people depicted seem to be a bit generic to the uneducated eye and do not claim a specific tribal / national identity feels weird at the end of 2024, but it also provokes an interesting discussion about the degree to which there isn't already a lot of syncretism among peoples who have experienced massive depopulation and loss of political agency, whether through intentional genocides, loss of territory, or disease. Its not hard to imagine this "North American Indian" identity found on Dorvan V being a syncretic identity that emerged in the 2100s once interstellar colonization really took off. Its strongly implied to be a "fresh start" movement that was itself controversial and many indigenous North Americas opted not to join them; but its membership could be plausibly drawn from many cultural identities.

However, the moral dilemma at the heart of the episode is handled with exquisite care and steadfastly refuses to make anyone objectively the bad guy. Every Federation character, even hardline consequentialist Admiral Nechayev, is respectful to the people of Dorvan V and mindful of their historical trauma even as it recognizes that the Federation's own interests are largely incompatible with respecting their demands.

Even Gul Evek, the named Cardassian leader of the show, relents after an impassioned plea from Picard. Evek admits to losing two out of three sons in the war and speculates that if the Dorvan V inhabitants leave the Cardassians alone, they will be left alone. Evek was convincing at least to this member of the audience. The framing felt hopeful rather than like everyone was being asked to swallow a Targ dung sandwich.

In checking to make sure I spelled his name correctly, I've become aware that Evek becomes a recurring character and I'm intrigued to see if there are clues to be found as to whether you could argue that he was lying or that events took on a life of their own and Evek was simply proven wrong. Its possible that Dorvan V was largely spared but the Obsidian Order or other elements of the Cardassian government decided to act in places it thought the Federation wouldn't be paying as close attention and the radicalization of the Maquis in turn radicalized Evek.

After all, since that the Cardassian Union was in effect waging a proxy war in the Demilitarized Zone, it would take little to convince some Cardassians that a guerilla movement with ex-Starfleet in almost all command roles and using Federation hardware represented a Federation proxy war with top level support. Which would in turn require the Federation to at least make some efforts at combating the Maquis in order to sell the Cardassians on the idea that the Maquis are not a plausibly deniable arm of Starfleet Intelligence.

But the Maquis are obviously are going to do what they need to do to defend their worlds, whether its their actual colonies or because they object to Starfleet sitting on its hands in the face of reports of atrocities.

In retrospect, for an era that was just testing the waters for multi-season arcs, this is such smart and tragic world building. Unlike say, the plot to destroy Qonos in Discovery or the anti-Changeling bioweapon being the Chekov's gun necessary to resolve the Dominion War, very little about the Maquis arc feels contrived and much more well supported by the world building around it.

[curator-on-ao3]

War Torn: 9, 2 and 6 if you please! ✨

Thank you, @regionalpancake, for asking about a story that took up residence in my mind and refused to leave except through my fingers into a document.

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

Nope. There was a lot of canon to wrangle between TNG, DS9, and VOY, and I knew that I wanted Captain Maxwell to inspire Janeway, Stompie to be worthy of O’Brien’s friendship, and Molly to resonate for both Janeway and O’Brien.

2: What scene did you first put down?

I write in order from front to back, so the first scene you read is the first scene I wrote. (But the first scene in my mind was the scene at the very end — we just had to get there.)

6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

This was my first fic that looked at Janeway pre-captaincy and it’s my only fic that focuses on her alpha canon Cardassian War experience. In “Prey,” the story Janeway tells Seven seemed so foundational to the leader Janeway became. The same goes for O’Brien’s Cardassian War reminiscences in episodes across TNG and DS9. I wanted to explore what made Janeway the Janeway we see and O’Brien the O’Brien we see. And I wanted them to be friends.

Thank you again, @regionalpancake, for asking about a story I feel fortunate to have written and a story you honor with your gorgeous illustrations as Star Trek Quarterly (on Facebook and WordPress) publishes the tale in serialized form.

Got a question for the Fic Asks? Please ask away!

[curator-on-ao3]

For Kathryn Janeway, war can be hell.

Fandom: Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relationships: Kathryn Janeway & Miles O'Brien, Kathryn Janeway/Mark Johnson Characters: Kathryn Janeway, Miles O'Brien, Benjamin Maxwell, Will Kayden, Molly (not that one and not the other one either) Summary: Though she’s nursing a broken heart, Lieutenant Kathryn Janeway talks her way onto a combat team to Setlik III — a mission that became famous within Starfleet for going horribly, horribly wrong. But, with her friend Miles O’Brien and others, Kathryn sees both the ugliness of war and the beauty of the Starfleet ideals she thinks she values.

[browncoatmando]

Qom’Bey part 1

The stars above Tyr’Goq had called to B’hatsal daughter of Daraq for as long as she could remember.  She supposed it was the same for any daughter of any Klingon House but there was something special about those stars, she had never seen them except from beneath the skies of her home. The “House of Daraq” were not warriors but farmers, tied to this world, tied to the land and Daraq could not or would not see beyond the farm that had been his family’s sole birthright for more than a dozen generations. She stared out the window, watching the sunset turn the distant mountains a deep red-brown.  Her computer terminal chirped at her and she quickly turned her attention to it.   This was the answer she was waiting for.  The black screen blinked to life and showed her an Imperial Navy Officer.   “Nuq’Neh. I welcome you to the Imperial Fleet Sogh B’hatsal Daughter of Daraq, may you bring Honor to your House.  You are to see Commander Stor’gak for your first assignment. Q’apla.” The signal cut out and the screen went black again. The simple statement brought her untold joy, not only had she enlisted but she passed the officer’s examination.  There was still another problem to overcome, perhaps the largest of all of the obstacles she had faced so far.  While her father Daraq knew and had approved of her desire to serve she had not told him about her plans to make the military her career. His words on the matter were burned into her memory “You wish to serve The Empire, it is both right and Honorable to do so. But remember B’hatsal, you are my daughter, my lands must pass to you. There is another way to serve your people and there is also Honor in that.” All she had known, all her father and his father before him for a dozen generations had known were the fields of Tyr’Goq. She wanted the stars, she wanted more than her family’s Targ Pens and groves of Zilm’kach trees. But how would she tell her family this? She had no choice but to tell them outright. Her mother was in the kitchen cooking while her father was still out in the fields leaving the two of them alone. “I just received my orders. I’m to go to the city and report to Commander Storg’ak.”   B’okur didn’t even look up and barely acknowledged her words. “I’ll have your father take you in the morning.” B’hatsal could tell all of this bothered her but she also knew her mother would never say so. “SoS? Are you alright?” She needed to do the right thing and ask anyway. “I will be B’hatsal.”  B’okur’s voice didn’t change and B’hatsal wasn’t entirely convinced. They spent the rest of the evening in awkward silence as everyone wondered where B’hatsal would end up. The Empire had officially been at peace for decades but space was often far more dangerous than outright warfare. The silence continued into the next morning when B’hatsal and Daraq spent the trip into the city without saying a word. They rarely came to the city and never for anything as important as this.  Neither had ever come to this part of it. The small, crowded streets gave way to a truly imposing structure meant to evoke the High Council building on Qo’NoS.  It bore the symbol of the Empire and surrounding its courtyard was a wall, easily twenty meters high with a guard tower on each corner. B’hatsal looked up, totally awestruck but Daraq just kept walking without taking his eyes off the course ahead. The heavy wooden doors were more decorative than anything and so she was struck by their intricately carved details. She was about to knock on them but they swung open before she could. A guard carrying a disruptor rifle and a Mek’leth in his belt answered. “You are B’hatsal daughter of Daraq?” “I am.” She answered with a solemn nod. He turned to Daraq and demanded “And you are Daraq?” “I am.” Daraq’s reply was equally solemn. “Then you may both enter.” He indicated the courtyard with a sweeping left hand. They crossed the cobblestones and entered the building following directions given by other armed guards and they arrived at an office overlooking the courtyard.  A Klingon man with dark, graying hair was there to meet them. “B’hatsal. I am Commander Storg’ak but I suspect you already knew that. I have your uniform for you.” He stood, pulled a heavy wooden box from beneath his desk and slid it across to her.  She left the room carrying it with a wide smile on her face. She reentered in full uniform, carrying a D’k tagh and disruptor on her belt and there was one detail on the collar Daraq noticed more than anything else. “Officer pins…Sogh… B’hatsal… you didn’t…”   Daraq sounded like he was somewhere between disappointment and anger. “I did. I am the first warrior this family has seen, why not be something greater?”  She remained calm but her words were clipped and precise, obviously holding back anger herself. “You will die alone in the cold emptiness of space surrounded by strangers.”  Daraq’s voice went cold but she was sure about his state of mind now. He was angrier than she had ever seen him. Storg’ak said nothing at first, just watching and letting her fight this battle for herself as was fitting of a newly minted warrior. “Should that happen there will be no strangers in Sto’Vo’Kor.” She fired back. “There are no strangers here.   I made this clear to you daughter, there is Honor in your service to the Empire but think of your duty to your family. Some are born to fight, some to build, others to farm.”   Her father spoke slowly, trying to convince her where she went wrong. “Have you never dreamed of a life beyond this planet?  You are content to live and die on the same patch of dirt and never see the stars?” She tried again, still angry but appealing to her father’s reason. Daraq took a deep breath and calmed himself before trying another tack. “I don’t hold your desires against you B’hatsal. I never have.  Outsiders see us as warriors and warriors only.  It is good to serve your people, it is right but there are other ways to serve.” “I have spent my entire life as common, just another qab ghom'a' 'emDaq ghoS. Why be just another Suvwi’ when I can command the respect you feel we are due?” Storg’ak chose that moment to join the argument. “Respect is exactly why I intervened on your daughter’s behalf.  Anyone who serves The Empire is worthy of it, but your house has been on Tyr’Goq for twelve generations. You are not considered to be among the Tuq’Bey but your house is the closest this planet has.” “You are not understanding this Commander…” Daraq growled back. B’hatsal was more than capable of defending herself and so she switched tactics again “Commander I can send my pay home correct?” “Yes.”  The Commander just nodded in response. “And I can request an assignment far from danger?”  She continued on the same course. “Yes, the Empire has been at peace for decades. You are not the only new warrior on Tyr’Goq so for the moment you won’t be going anywhere.  I’m assigning you and your fellow warriors to Qom’Bey.  Study and learning mean nothing unless you can apply it.”  Storg’ak had a reply for this argument as well. B’hatsal knew the name, Qom’Bey had been built here more than a century ago, named for the trademark sound of local canine predators.  She knew that sound as well, packs of them preyed on her family’s Targs from time to time.    In a sense she owed those beasts a debt. While she had never shot to kill, they were simply animals acting on their nature, driving them away had taught her how to handle a disruptor. “Your fears are unfounded Daraq.  You have my word that when the time comes your lands will pass to your daughter.”  Stor’gak was known to be a man of Honor and while Daraq was unhappy with the outcome he had no choice but to accept it.     He was one of many parents to see their sons and daughters to the shuttle bays in the back of the complex.  She could read the mixed emotions on his face and that was the last he saw of her for some time. She saw her world from orbit for the first time and it was so much larger than she had ever imagined. She saw the fields beyond the cities as a patchwork of brown and green while the cities were only specks of light against the dark. She saw the mountains but only barely while the drydocks ahead of her and the ships held inside them dominated her vision.   All but one, Qom’Bey stood apart from all the others with a stream of shuttles arriving and departing, no doubt her fellow warriors and the provisions they needed. Her shuttle was the last to arrive and carried only crew.  She was the only officer aboard and so the others kept silent out of respect, leaving her to her wandering thoughts.  One of them was that they could simply have used a transporter but that wouldn’t give the new arrivals quite the same view. She barely heard the pilot announce that they were docking but that news quickly adjusted her thinking.  It dawned on her right then that this was real.  Her heart started to beat faster and she mentally kicked herself for her nervousness.  She was grateful that her thick leather boots echoed off the metal grate floor and covered the sound of her suddenly heavier breathing.   Her officer’s commission didn’t get her much onboard the old ship but it did get her a room she didn’t have to share with the masses of common warriors beneath her and somewhere to display the few personal items she brought onboard.  While she learned to lead and command they learned to listen and she reflected on how much she had yet to learn. Klogok proved to be a hard man but a fair one. As a Klingon captain should be she thought after yet another simulated battle.  Klogok was a veteran of various conflicts, most recently against the traitorous House of Duras, and while he was perhaps past his prime he could still teach and teach well. It was Klogok who announced to his students that The Empire had gone to war with The Cardassian Union.   They all paid attention to current events and so they all knew the reasons why, at least as the High Council saw it. The Dominion had infiltrated Cardassian territory, overthrown their leaders and replaced them with Changelings. There was only one proper response.    B’hatsal heard something in his voice, something almost sad.  Everyone aboard knew he would likely never hold another frontline command and that his glory days were behind him. That had to be it.  When my time comes Captain, I will dedicate my first victory to you.  While Sto’Vo’Kor waits for you already it is the Honorable thing to do. Klogok took an interest in her career over the course of the next several weeks, Stor’gak was a man of some influence in this area of The Empire and so he knew she had to be something special for his superior to support her like he had. “We’re being sent into battle.” He told her a couple of months after her arrival onboard. “The Chancellor needs more warriors on the front.” “We’re being assigned to qaD'a' wi?”  She asked with almost childish joy. The Vor’cha was part of the latest generation of Klingon warships, heavily armed, highly maneuverable and more than a match for any Cardassian vessel. “No B’hatsal. We travel aboard the vessel you have come to know and love.”  Klogok answered her question with a smile on his face. “Qom’bey!? It’s little more than a museum ship!”  She did nothing to hide her surprise and almost disappointment. Klogok kept talking, ignoring her negative reaction to the news. “A museum ship that still holds a KDF commission. We both have our orders Sogh. The Chancellor has called us to battle and so we must answer.  I am making you second officer under Gradok.”   She tried to object, she felt unworthy of the Honor but he didn’t let her speak. “You are the only one aboard qualified, the chief engineer has no command training or experience and no one else aboard is an officer.” The old K’tinga wasn’t really meant for front line duty and so she was grossly undermanned, where she should have a crew of 800 the best Tyr’Goq could manage was a quarter of that. B’hatsal couldn’t say she was happy about that but a starship was a starship. Klogok laid her concerns to rest. “Stor’gak has a target for us, just something to give the new warriors a taste of action.”  He chuckled at his next comment “A new crew for an old ship… After that we’ll return while the rest continue on.  You are the first of your house to become a warrior correct?” She nodded. “And an officer no less, you have brought Honor to your family.” “If only my family saw that.” She grumbled. “They will. You need only find the right occasion.” She left his ready room and returned to her quarters to record a message for her parents.  If she could not find the right occasion she would make one. “43rd day of Maktag Year of Kahless 998. Sogh B’hatsal IKS Qom’Bey I hope this message finds you and the crops in good health and I truly hope my pay has reached you. I understand that it does not make my absence easier to bear but I know I will bring you Honor, that I will carry your names and memory with me as we go into battle for the first time.  I cannot say much more than that, I serve under fine officers and command warriors eager to prove their worth.   Qom’Bey is an undercrewed training vessel and I know the Captain will not lead us into any great danger and so we should return home soon. While neither of you agreed with my choice to serve it is for you and all of those who do not fight that I must.   All of us swore to preserve The Empire but I took my oath with you in mind. I fight to protect your lands and hope to see them again soon.  Q’apla!” She sent the message and left her quarters, not wanting to hear any answer they might give.  She had other things to be concerned with now. She made her way to the bridge while the crew scrambled to their stations, obeying the orders echoing through the halls.   “Sent into battle immediately… Klogok failed to mention that.”  B’hatsal grumbled to no one and continued on her way…