11: Arithmetic on the Frontier
The Undeclared War in the Disputed Area, 2260-2261
“A scrimmage in a Border Station --
A canter down some dark defile --
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail --
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!”
- Rudyard Kipling, Arithmetic on the Frontier
The Rules of the Game
Mardikian II is not a particularly interesting planet. It barely qualifies as a planet to start with – its size and mass are barely more than that of Earth’s moon, and its thin atmosphere bis arely enough to qualify as breathable. It has no mineral wealth of any kind; no wildlife of any significance; no population of any significance whatsoever, beyond 5-8,000 odd individualist humans who lived an agrarian lifestyle on its northern continent. The only noteworthy thing on the planet was the presence of several minerals on the planet’s mountain ranges continent that confused subspace sensors, but these were not found in any abundance. It is a “nothing” planet.
Its erratic orbit, however, carries it far out of the centre of the Mardikian system; so far out, in fact, that if one were to place a high-frequency subspace telescope and listening station upon the planet’s foothills, you could monitor almost all movement in and out of Klingon space in the Archanis sector. The Mardikian system, thanks to some strange accident of nature, lies downstream of what is designated subspace eddy 14-Alpha-X.[1] It is not a significant galactic feature – it barely appears on star charts – but it means that almost all warp signatures that enter Klingon space near Archanis, Korvat, Khitomer and Mastocal can be picked up there with such pinpoint accuracy that you can tell how finely balanced the matter-antimatter matrix of a warship is over 50 light years away. With the right equipment, of course.
Starfleet Command made this discovery accidentally at the start of the Klingon War, when the USS Archer used the Mardikian eddy to track the movements of House Kor’s Fleets. Post-war, discussions about taking advantage of the eddy had been shelved in favour of more immediate demands like trade protection. It was only in 2260, at the height of the Klingon Land War, that Starfleet became interested again in monitoring traffic in the region, mainly as part of ongoing antipiracy operations. Initial plans for an orbital station we sunk due to the inability to hide it; instead, the decision was made to build an installation on the planet itself. It took five months for the Corps of Engineers to plan and construct the Mardikian II listening post, tunnelling deep into a mountainous region on the planet’s northern continent before building a reactor and bringing in the immense amounts of equipment needed. The outpost – better known as Outpost Inchon – would go operational on November 25th, 2260, and would immediately prove its work. Within weeks, their small team at Inchon would be cataloguing and monitoring the movements of nearly 100 ships at a time. Their intelligence quickly became a vital part of Starfleet’s anti-piracy and anti-slavery campaigns in the planet, allowing the various task forces of the 2nd and 4th Fleet to monitor the courses of the raiding fleets that sallied forth from Klingon space with almost pin-point accuracy.
The decision to build Outpost Inchon reflects the sea change in Starfleet risk assessments at the beginning of the 2260s. The concept of building a forward outpost so close to Klingon space would have been considered too provocative in the post-armistice environment; it would have been anathema in the pre-war years. But the experience of the Suliban Crisis, Caleb IV and then the Raktajino Revolution underline how unprepared Starfleet was for the “new” Klingon Empire. The rules of contact were changing. Starfleet could no longer rely completely on the intrepid Starship Captains to fly the flag alone. Stations like Mardikian II formed part of a larger, comprehensive information-gathering network that began to expand across 2260, encompassing sensor drones, relay outposts, overt intelligence personnel and the spies and informants of the “Botchtok Whigs” network. N’Garriez’s network had been an indispensable source of information in 2259 and 60, but by the end of that year, it was only one part of an emerging network that aimed to monitor all movement along the disputed area. Starfleet Command had plenty of justification for this sea change. Passive monitoring would allow better convoy protection and reduce the need for Starships to engage in active patrolling. It would also allow for increased interdiction of pirate raids, in time.
It didn’t take the Empire long to figure out that outpost Inchon existed. Its intelligence had been a vital part of operations Saigon, Macao and Macao II, which saw elements of DESRON 5 and the Federation Border Patrol intercept and break up three raiding parties before they passed through the Archanis sector. Imperial Intelligence pinpointed the base in late March 2261. Initial plans to bombard the planet from orbit were cast off after it became clear that Inchon was surrounded by erratic minerals, meaning that the base, as deeply as it was dug into the foothills, would likely survive the inaccurate bombardment unscathed. While, with time, the Klingons could probably have found a scientific solution to the inaccuracy, their martial instinct was stronger. The quickest, and more glorious way to remove this garb fly would be via ground assault. The D6 Cruiser IKS Reincarnation was sent, along with 480 Imperial foot soldiers to remove the ‘earthers’ from the planet.
Outpost Inchon had a small crew. Beyond its command staff and subspace signals officers, its security staff consists of a mere 25 Starfleet Security personnel, armed with nothing heavier than phaser rifles and a single Photon grenade launcher. Their main defence was staying hidden, and at worst the hope that a relief vessel from Starbase 24 would arrive in a short time. Reincarnation’s assault began quickly on the night of the 18th of May, with a screen of photon torpedoes wiping out the orbital communications satellite before Inchon could raise the alarm. The 400 Imperial Marines landed soon afterwards. Unable to beam through the outpost’s shields, they made planetfall about 18 kilometres from the settlement, beginning the 5-hour march to their target immediately. It did not give the Security team much time to prepare; even bolstered by the outpost’s comms staff, they only had 60 armed officers to face over four times their number. It was not good odds.
The first Klingon assault was clumsy, brutal, and inefficient. The only entrance into Inchon was a single tunnelled entrance, defended by an armoured security post. A company of Klingons attempted to rush the position, only to be cut down in the open by phaser fire, with 46 Klingons falling for no losses on Starfleet’s side. A second attack would be attempted an hour later, accompanied by supporting fire and a disruptor barrage from a stationary cannon that had been hauled up the hillside. This too was pushed back, but with serious losses on the side of the outpost; all five personnel inside the security post were killed by a direct hit from the disruptor cannon. Inchon’s security chief pulled their people back inside the outpost, trading space for time in the hope that someone had noticed the outpost’s silence.
Someone had, thankfully. Starbase 24 noted the curt end to the comms feed immediately. Its CO had immediately suspected foul play and dispatched the Kirov Class USS Indefatigable and the Marine transport USS Tripoli to investigate. The two vessels would arrive three days into the siege, as the Klingon landing force began to cut through the third and final set of castrodinium doors that protected the main outpost from the outside.
The Reincarnation, a lighter Klingon cruiser, was no match for the Indefatigable and withdrew before the Starfleet vessel could even threaten it with phaser fire. Tripoli’s marine group (consisting of elements of the 31st (Tellarite People’s Volunteer) Regiment and the 11th (Hussars) Armoured Company) prepared for a contested landing. However, upon planetfall, they were surprised the find out the Klingons had gone. Their dead had been buried neatly in rows outside of Inchon. Their heavy equipment, prized artillery pieces that had been hauled up the hillside by the Imperial marines, lay abandoned on the other side of the small road that connected the outpost with the hillside landing area.
Upon further investigation, it became clear that instead of doing what many had expected of them – dying gloriously in battle – the Klingon soldiers had withdrawn 55 kilometres overnight to another mountain range that overlooked Inchon and set up a fortified camp there. It took the marine force three days to march cross country to their position, and when they arrived, the hilltop had been transformed into a fortress of its own. Recent orders unearthed from the Imperial archives had made it apparent that this break with Klingon tradition was not, as previously thought, a single act of guile and cunning by the Klingon’s commander. Instead, the official imperial orders for the operation – issued by Sturka himself – state that if the force is unable to destroy the base immediately, it is to “find a nearby strategic position, fortify it, and begin a long-term harassing campaign against the outpost.”
The Klingon base – soon nicknamed “Hellfire Corner” by the marines – was a death trap, with dozens of kill zones and cleared paths of fire preventing any covered approach. There was no way that the Tellar Volunteers would be able to clear it, even with mechanized support. After a failed negotiation, and a disastrous attempt by the federation forces to rush the outpost, their CO ordered a staged withdrawal back to a perimeter around Inchon. Even this defence line – roughly 10 kilometres from Inchon itself – was still thinly held, even when reinforcements were deployed from the Tripoli. Klingon harassing attacks on the line began almost immediately, with snipers, mortar barrages and night raids forcing the marines to remain on constant alert. After 11 days, Inchon would send the following signal to Starfleet Command:
“KLINGON FORCE HAS ENTRENCHED ON OPPOSING POSITION AND IS PREPARED TO CONTINUE HARASSING MARINE DETACHMENTS INDEFINITELY. RECOMMEND THAT FEDERATION MARINE CORPS REMAIN ON MARDIKIAN II TO PROTECT OUTPOST INCHON UNTIL DIPLOMATIC SOLUTION CAN BE FOUND.”
Starbase 24’s commander, Commodore Q’varak, issued a provisional order, authorizing the deployment of the entire 31st Regiment (with supporting elements) on the provision it was not rescinded by Klingon Command. Rittenhouse endorsed the order; as did Starfleet Command. The Klingons responded quickly, flying in another battlegroup of Imperial Marines during a solar storm that blinded the sensor array. Command authorised a “proportional increase in personnel”. By the end of 2261, there would be 3,500 Federation Marines on Mardikian II, alongside a further 800 Starfleet personnel. There would also be 6,500 Klingon warriors, both regular foot soldiers and members of the Imperial Marines.[2] Mardikian II had now become a new front in the undeclared war – at least until the diplomatic corps found a solution.[3]
The Klingon diplomats on Orion, however, were not interested in a solution. The official line was that the commander of the Klingon marine force had gone rogue and taken his soldiers with him and was thus none of their concern. It had happened before, apparently. No one bought the line, but it served to wash the Empire of official responsibility for the action and paint any Starfleet escalatory response as being “overzealous”. It was just another play in the Great Game, and a serious one too. So long as the Klingon presence on Mardikian II remained, the subspace outpost was threatened with destruction. While Klingon Command did consider a more direct, offensive situation to the incursion, everyone knew that Starfleet Headquarters (and more importantly the president) would never approve of offensive action on such a scale. Inchon could be reinforced, and the Marine battlegroup could conduct local spoiling attacks, but they were largely a defensive force. Their job was to make sure the Klingons didn’t take the outpost; not remove them from the planet entirely.
These were the Rules of the Game. Starfleet, even in its rejuvenated, alert state after the Klingon war and the Shukar report, was still a Peacekeeping force. Its orders, mission profiles, and rules of engagement were hesitant, limited, and defensive. It could reinforce allied worlds; conduct scouting operations along its trade routes and border posts; bring in heavier Starships to fly the flag and remind the Klingons of their capabilities, but they could never conduct the overt offensives the Klingons did. Thanks to its principles, Starfleet would always surrender the tactical strategic initiative to the Klingon Empire. They were fighting the Undeclared War with a hand tied behind their own back; one tied by their own hands.
By mid-2261 Mardikian II was one of eight long-term deployments authorised by the Federation Security Council. Stretched thin and fighting a more capable opponent, the professional army of the Federation – both the Infantry of the CAF and the MACOs – struggled to hold their own against the Imperial Army. “Mardikian II was bloody murder,” Patrick Ch’O’Leary remembered. “The was no way to avoid death there.” Ch’O’Leary spent two weeks on Mardikian II in August 2261, leading an engineering team from the Malcolm Reed alongside the UFP Marines and newly arrived elements of the 2nd Battalion, Fusilier Regiment (Earth)[4]. Most of their mission had involved helping to build roads, irrigation ditches and power relays along the route to the front, but 8 days into their tour Ch’O’Leary was asked to lead a group up to the front and assist in the construction of a Starfleet Mobile Auxiliary Support Hospital (SMASH) unit.
“The MACOs were riding shotgun in all our vehicles, leaning out the doors with their Phaser carbines at the hip, while their officer grinned at me from behind the controls, ignoring the whip-crash of chemical shells and the bark of distant disruptor fire.”[5] The convoy was hit on several occasions, killing several soldiers and some Starfleet engineers. “The Fusilier officer didn’t seem too hurt by loss. He shook his head with frustration and apologised for the delay as our personnel heaved the burning skimmer and its dead crew off the winding road. There was part of him that seemed excited to get back up to the front, and back into the action. His whole platoon seemed excited to get to grips with the enemy and get back for all the combat they missed in the Klingon war. They didn’t know what they’d escaped.”
The SMASH unit was located around 4 miles from the line of contact, but it was by no means a safe zone. Ch’O’Leary’s personnel and the CAF engineers worked through shell fire, disruptor barrages and sniper fire to build the hospital while the fusiliers tried to push the Klingon infantry off the overlooking hills. “The noise of battle was constant – as constant as the scream-smash of mortars and pop-guns that pounded our corner of hell all day and all night.”[6] There was an expectation that the Klingon ground troops on Mardikian II would fight as they had during the Klingon War, with mass wave attacks, brutal hand-to-hand combat and the gratuitous use of explosives in close quarters. This was not how they fought now. Even with the poor training of the new Imperial Army, the emphasis on defensive firepower (after mass assaults failed) was telling, especially to the “poor bloody infantry” of the Federation Ground Forces as they tried to scale the hilltops of Mardikian II.
“The Klingon ground pounders melted into the hills, invisible until the moment a fusillade of disruptors screeched out of the undergrowth, or a troop of warriors thundered down a gully, firing from the hip. It was utterly terrifying. You’d be standing behind a rock, safe from the enemy, and then a green bolt of energy would clip the ground next to you. Or maybe, another day, you’d be moving equipment across the compound and your every move would be followed by mortar shots with pinpoint accuracy. We learned very quickly to move like the fusiliers, in short bounds, doubled over, borrowed helmets clutched to our heads.”[7]
The Fusilier Lieutenant was amused by the sight of O’Leary and the officers ducking along with their men. “He was mad. Completely mad. I watched him lead his platoon up the hill into a hail of green disruptor fire, standing upright while everyone else ducked and weaved through the scrubland. He didn’t seem to mind the danger.” The bravery of the fusiliers was enough to clear the hilltops around the SMASH unit, and their lieutenant returned in triumph, grinning from ear to ear. “He waved at me from a small hilltop. ‘Good show!’ he hollered, waving his carbine like a swagger stick. The boy went to add something more but was cut off by a shill, high-pitched shriek. His body toppled to the floor, lifeless, his flesh hissing from where the disruptor bolt had hit him square in the chest.”
“They never found that sniper. Fusilier sergeant reckoned they vaporised themselves to escape capture. That boy cost 68,000 Federation credits to educate as an officer. He’d cost around 150,000 to equip from head to toe. It had probably cost Starfleet nearly 350,000 more on top of that to ship him out here to the back of beyond. He’d been killed by a disruptor you can buy in a Regulan flea market for five strips of latinum. That kid, who had the finest tactical training you can find in the Alpha Quadrant, had been cut down with the ease of a hunter shooting a deer. What a waste.”
The Sound of the Guns
Starfleet Command had not meant to get caught in a frozen war on Mardikian II. It had not meant to get caught in a scuffle over the St. Louis De Ha-Ha! asteroid field on the edge of the Alshanai Rift. It had not meant to divert vital destroyers and escorts into the Eminiar gap. But by September 2261, it was committed in all these places. The Federation Council, frightened by growing escalation, baulked at the authorising the commitments, but what could it do? The Empire’s control of Mardikian II would allow it to use if the for the same monitoring purposes as Starfleet, but for far more nefarious purposes. The cat-and-mouse battle between DESRON 2 and elements of the 2nd Fleet Group was over a worthless collection of tritanium and gold, but it sat right on the edge of the only clear route through the Alshanai Rift. The Eminiar Gap was a long way from anywhere important, but unless Starfleet went after the Klingon-backed raiders, law and order in the region would completely collapse.
Across the frontier, Klingon forces had begun to operate overtly against planetary installations, outposts, and colonies, as part of a new coherent strategy by the Empire to cement its frontier deeper in the disputed area. By the middle of the year, the situation was slipping out of control. Mardikian II and the Vota Cluster were now joined by sightings of Klingon destroyers within 4 parsecs of the Argelian approaches, as well as a deadly raid on the merchant marine refuelling facility on Mack-14 Beta. What Starfleet struggled to understand was the reasoning behind the new Klingon approach. Before 2260, Klingon raiding had been very random. Attacks had focused on targets of opportunity over strategic goals; profit and glory superseded anything else. The gutting of the Imperial Fleet had allowed Sturka to invoke a new level of professionalism at every level, including some form of strategy. “Sturka had a plan,” remembered Zym, an advisor of L’Rell’s. “A proper plan. Not just a desire for revenge, glory, or conquest for the sake of conquest. Something that felt concrete. And Chancellor L’rell loved it.”[8]
The origin of the new strategy – which built directly upon the bombastic claims of the “T’Kuvma Line”, made in early 2258 - lay in the disasters of the early Raktajino Revolution. The failure of Imperial forces to hold supply stations and bases on planets during the Land War had allowed the rebels to make rapid advances, and in return, the lack of large ground garrisons had prevented the swift end of the rebellion. Even as the first Klingon attack began on Mardikian II, the Imperial Army remained bogged down across the fringe of the empire in counter-insurgency operations against remaining Quch’ha rebels and minor nobles. As much as this new colonial quagmire frustrated the Klingons, it provided ample space and time to experiment and theorise new concepts about grand strategy – and the key to beating the ‘earthers’. The Navy’s victory against the Suvan rebels had been an uphill struggle against poor logistics, limited by the short operational ranges of most of the fleet; what rapid progress had occurred came where loyalist forces had maintained supply dumps for the Navy’s use.[9]
The five years of formalisation and institutionalisation since the end of T’Kuvma’s War had, by 2261, created a capable naval bureaucracy that could turn battlefield reports and concerns into something useful. Despite interference from the great houses and derision from frontline captains, the “desk-bound cowards” of Naval Command worked to ensure that the gains made since 2257 could be secured – and expanded upon. With the revolt (officially) suppressed, the Navy’s conclusions pointed towards the need for a much stronger, more capable supply system, built around planetary bases and installations. Imperial Navy planners were, by late 2260, finalising a list of nearly 70 planets, moons and planetoids on which naval supply bases could be established.[10] Notably, over 30 of these were outside of the externally recognised boundaries of the Klingon Empire; 10 were within the Federation Treaty Zone. All would need to be secured and garrisoned by the Imperial Army, which was chomping at the bit for new campaigns. The Navy was happy to give them what they wanted.
Late 2260 had seen a massive expansion of the Imperial Army, which now numbered nearly 7.8 million personnel (including 3.1 million auxiliary forces from non-Klingon species).[11] The Klingon Army and Imperial Marine force, who had long been relegated to fighting rebels and civilians, savoured the prospect of a “real war” in the disputed area. Their rivalry with the navy – encouraged in part by L’Rell – saw them relish every part of their place in the new order. Rapid expansion inevitably did not come with rapid growth in command-and-control skills. The Raktajino revolution’s impact on the most recent years of conscripts left a massive gap in the number of junior officers and NCOs, most of whom had been killed on either side of the land war. Outside the Imperial Marine corps, units were desperately short of leaders – even more so in the auxiliary forces, where units of over 150 men were led by 1 or 2 junior officers of “pure Klingon origin”.[12]
This was of no real concern to either the Army or the Navy. “The Army does not need to be precise, or clever”, Sturka commented morbidly. “They just need to kill the enemy as quickly and brutally as possible, and they do that happily.” This they certainly did, especially after L’Rell signed off the Navy’s plans to seize the first 20 of the 45 new bases they wished to acquire in the next 29 months. 14 of these bases were within the Federation Treaty Zone; most of the others within neutral space still patrolled by Starfleet. Some of the attacks were uncontested, others were complete debacles. An attempted landing within the Holborn Lilac system in April 2261 was discovered by the Federation Starship Kuznetsov. The Klingon Captain of the escort ship (IKS Punishments of U’Mak) panicked and blew up the transport he was escorting so it would not fall into Federation hands. 3,900 soldiers were killed.
This was not the norm, however. Most of the locations targeted for new bases were taken without much of a fight, and where there were already inhabitants, they were no match for Klingon soldiers backed up with the firepower of an orbital warship. Where combat did occur, such as on Mardikian II, the Imperial Army and Marines forces relied on shock over firepower and tactics. Despite having a relatively large arsenal of artillery and mechanised equipment, the army still preferred to rush positions en masse first before using its heavy chemical artillery pieces and disruption mortars to soften up a position. It worked in most cases; where it didn’t, however, Federation Ground Forces found themselves caught in brutal close-quarters battles with the Klingons. There were no short deployments anymore. The Imperial Army was unwilling to accept tactical or temporary defeat the same way the FGF would. Like Starfleet, the “poor bloody infantry” of the Federation was now caught in the struggle for the disputed area. “The FGF has lost all ability to choose its battlefields,” complained Major General Cussans, C-in-C of Federation Ground Forces in the border area. “We are merely marching to the sound of the guns.”[13]
The commitments were unacceptable on paper. More deployments meant more ships to cover the larger space, which meant more ships pulled away from exploratory duty. If not that, it meant a reduction to convoy escorts, colonial support, or another part of the Star Fleet that simply could not afford the losses. So that meant more ships, which meant more battles with the Allocations Committee, the Security Council and the Federation Council itself. All the while, the Klingon Imperial Navy grew in strength, pushing its operating areas further into the disputed area while sending out more and more “unauthorised pirate raids” into Federation space.
Starfleet’s leadership was split on an overall direction. Local, reactive responses across the end of 2260 and the beginning of 2261 resulted in a mess of planetary quagmires and overextended task forces. Rittenhouse’s vaunted DESRONs and CRURONs – still not completely up to strength – were coping better than their predecessors but were operating around individual plans instead of a coherent front-wide strategy. For Shukar and Rittenhouse, that coherent “unified objective” remained the missing keystone in Starfleet’s operations. What exactly the objective was still escaped them, however. First Caleb IV had shown that aggressive action without proper planning and support was worse than no action at all; the withdrawal from Archanis had merely shown that overextension was far worse than initial estimates showed.
For Rittenhouse, the overall lesson was that the response had to be delivered along the entire border, by all formations, with complete political and logistical backing. “It’s gotta be all of nothing,” he told Shukar in early 2261. “Once we start to draw the line, we can’t stop drawing it. The Klingons don’t stop when their operations are done, so why should we?” That sort of constant tempo required a lot of things Starfleet couldn’t deliver in 2261. It required a massive upswing in the logistical effort, from fleet tenders and deuterium tankers to new subspace relays and storage facilities. Transport Command was still relying on an ageing collection of Giant and Desert class tenders for resupply work. Their replacements – the Derf and Starmaster classes – were far more capable, but delivery was slow, and further hampered by competition for the two classes between Transport Command, Materiel Command, The Corps of Engineers and the Merchant Marine.
While Rittenhouse and some of the more hawkish representatives on the Federation Council wanted the DESRONs to operate “right on the sharp end”, the logistics simply didn’t add up. In the cases where long-range operations were attempted (such as Task Force Haroun’s sweep of the spinward side of the Alshanai Rift), vessels were forced to pile deuterium in unsecured cargo bays and shuttle landing decks, with catastrophic results. The loss of the Roanoke and the Ho Chi Minh can both be unambiguously linked to improper fuel storage. So, as long as the DESRONs were limited to their existing range, there would be no “counter-push” along the frontier. The “hard front” that Rittenhouse wanted would have to wait – and the longer it did, the more the border area deteriorated into an archipelago of Federation and Klingon bases, each with their own vulnerabilities and advantages.
This was fine, to some. Admiral Nogura, for his part, considered Rittenhouse’s “Broad Front Strategy” to be a pipe dream. “Uncle Shu’s right that we need a central strategy and a stronger tactical response,” he told Toussaint. “What we don’t need is a strategy that involves casting that strong tactical response to the four winds and hoping it does something there.”[14] As chief of Starfleet Operations, Nogura was at the heart of the logistical, bureaucratic and materiel reforms that were churning through the Presidio. This was both by necessity and design, but mostly by bureaucratic accident.
Starfleet Operations was, by early 2261, the largest and most bloated department within the stellar service. When it had been created in the Shran reforms, it had made sense. By creating a third party to control and deliver on supply, ship delivery, construction, and shore operations, Shran forestalled the creation of a Byzantine logistical system before it codified itself. Unfortunately, it was not a permanent solution. In the 80 years since then, Starfleet Operations had ended up with its finger in almost every pie in the fleet, whether it liked it or, with a purview that covered everything from the delivery of war nacelles to Axanar Fleet Yards to the specifics of Medusan-Trill translation matrixes. Every decade or so, Starfleet Command would relent and remove a department from its purview – first creating Transport Command, and then Support and Auxiliary Command, and then Colonial Operations, and so on and so forth.
Except, of course, it didn’t really remove them from Operations. Even when ALLANGTRANS and Colonial Ops were made separate departments, they still had to go through Starfleet Operations to get anything done. Even when the delineation lines were made clear, crucial bureaucratic components remained with Operation s because there was no real way to remove them. Even though the Starfleet Reserve had been a separate department since 2220, the Office of Fleet Readiness remained part of Starfleet Operations well into the 2290s. By the 2250s, the department was a bloated, unmanageable mess that was essentially incapable of central management. Its internal machinations, personal fiefdoms and internal memo wars were subject to constant ridicule. President Th’rhahlat referred to it as the “Holy Roman Empire”; Captain Pike called it “the labyrinth”. Being made Chief of Starfleet Operations was considered (in no particular order) a death sentence, a retirement notice or a sisyphean quest for fools. It was, thus, no surprise that Ch’Shukar would choose Heihachiro Nogura to take the reins of “Starfleet’s wild horse”.
Nogura was already a long-service flag officer by 2260. He had entered Starfleet Academy in 2216 and graduated 4th in the class. He briefly served as yeoman to Captain Richard Robau aboard the USS Kelvin, before returning to San Francisco as an instructor.[15] 14 years as a Starship commander – as well as a field agent of the nascent, but still byzantine Starfleet Intelligence - saw Nogura see almost every part of the Federation. He built a reputation as a quiet, deliberating intelligence commander, with the emotional range (and temperament) of a Vulcan. He rarely argued, snarled, or made a joke. Only two people ever made him laugh: his sister and his husband, whom he had married only a day after their academy graduation ceremony. He was a strange officer to serve under. Bob Wesley called him “the demon headmaster” as a form of praise; Chrisjen Paris, who served as his Science Officer on both USS Endurance and Lafayette, referred to him as a sort of “cold, but still caring older brother, who showed affection by beating up your bullies.” His crews respected him, and he respected him.
Nogura’s time on the frontier only came to an end when his last command – USS Intrepid – was destroyed by Klingons in 2243 after a three-day “sub hunt” through the Vota Star Cluster.[16] His desire for a new command is evident in the number of requests he sent to Starfleet Command; a barrage that abruptly ended after the sudden death of his husband from Rigellian Fever in January 2244: on the same day that his older sister was killed in a shuttle accident. Nogura’s diary, a constant record of his life and career since his first week at the academy, marks the 12th of January 2244 with a single X. The next entry – six weeks later – records his first day as the commander of Starbase Four. He was never really the same: the taciturn but patrician captain fell aside, subsumed by the “demon headmaster”, who knew all and loved little.
Nogura’s brief period as C-in-C of Starbase 4 was curtailed by the fallout from Tarsus IV. In the aftermath of the colonial crisis, Nogura was installed as the new head of Starfleet Colonial Command by the Admiralty; a sideways promotion that he turned from a career dead-end into a surprise statement of intent. Colonial Command – once a poorly run, ineffectual backwater of Starfleet, reinvented itself as the backbone of frontier support.
Despite this stunning proof of competence – and skill – Nogura’s quiet but bullish attitude to leadership did not endear him to the Admiral’s Council. “He’s not a team player,” Admiral Gorch would tell Shukar in early 2256. “He wants everyone to come to him and every important thing to come from him. And we won’t give him what he wants, he’ll move it himself. There is only one person Nogura really believes he is responsible to: Nogura.” The “Grand old Man’s” overreaching at Colonial Command – as effective as it was – did nothing but irritate the Admiral’s council.
There were many other things that irritated them. Nogura never met anger with anger, preferring to simply continue as if he was merely discussing the finer points of starship registry. Sometimes, when a staff officer – or superior officer – was boring him, he would pull out a padd and begin highlighting sections from technical manuals or intelligence reports. If you were really taxing his patience, he would instead start making cuttings from a physical paper newspaper (usually The Times of London) with a laser scalpel. He preferred the company of intelligence officers and defence analysts to that of scientists and diplomats. Sometimes, for pleasure, he used to ride a horse through the grounds of Starfleet headquarters and the Academy quad, much to the fury of the grounds staff. He would disappear for hours at a time without leaving any forwarding location; often, he could be found in tea shops, playing majong or arguing the finer points of galactic diplomatic policy with the shop’s elderly residents.
Despite a catalogue of diplomatic honours as a Starship commander, Nogura. had no patience for a formal ceremony or official dress codes. He used any pretext he could find to avoid memorial ceremonies and parades. He once snubbed President Sariv by turning up to the official launch of USS Lexington in engineer’s overalls.[17] Another time, he walked out of an appointment with Commissioner Hedford so he could dictate a memorandum on food security in the Hiromi Cluster. His disregard for pomp – and general disrespect for anyone who he thought wasn’t as smart as him – did not help with civilian officials either, whom he regarded as ill-informed, ill-intentioned and ill-humoured. During one official visit by the Security Council to Starfleet Headquarters, Alpha Centauri Ambassador asked Nogura what the current dispositions of the merchant navy were. Nogura stared at her for three seconds before replying “If all goes to plan, ma’am, they are all in space.”
As such, Nogura did not have many allies. “The Grand Old Man has no friends,” Jim Kirk once said. “Only interests.”[18] This was certainly true; Nogura’s own ideals and plans involved little in the way of alliances, but a lot in the way of apprentices and proteges. Promotion to Chief of Personnel just before the war allowed him to extend his directive will into the careers of many officers, promoting and supporting those he believed had “the right stuff”. Many of these officers, including Jose Mendez, Chrisjen Paris and Xana Nouille, would forever rotate in Nogura’s orbit. Others, like Jim Kirk, Angela Fukuhara and Tom Moody, found him to be a far more intrusive and manipulative character than he originally appeared, and later lamented the “hand of god” that guided them through their careers.
Nogura didn’t mind. As much as he knew people despised his meddling, he had the self-belief to know he was right. “Unlike Rittenhouse, I don’t need to prove I’m right,” he told Peter Toussaint. He didn’t need to prove it because he almost always was. Nogura seemed to know everything about a topic before the subject experts did. He ran rings around Ash Tyler of Starfleet Intelligence at every meeting they had and was better informed on dispositions along the border than its fleet commanders. Nogura once boasted, in his own way, that he knew more about the Klingon Empire than the Chancellor did; he was probably correct in that assessment.
He never used his immense knowledge to gloat, or cheat, though. He manipulated, yes. He moved officers up in the ranks ahead of others and assigned them together so they could form friendships and connections that he wished them to find, but only with the intention of strengthening the Star Fleet at every stage. He undermined fellow admirals and reached into their departments to meddle in their activities; but at every stage, he was vindicated by his success. He revelled in his Sphinx-like personality, and others did too, including Shukar. “It’s a bit like having a pet feline. He might bite your hand off, or piss on your best coat, but he kills every god-damn rodent within a hundred metres of your house without you even noticing.” At the end of the day, there were only two things Nogura believed in.
Nogura had been Uncle Shu’s first pick for Chief of Starfleet Operations back in 2258 but had shelved it when it became clear that the rest of admiralty – and the security council – were unwilling to let such an uncooperative figure be promoted. The debacle at Caleb IV had given Shukar and Th’rhahlat the room they needed to bring in “their people”. Nogura’s brief time on the Starfleet Intelligence Planning Committee (IPC) had earned him some credit with the security council, especially over the increasing effectiveness of active SIGNIT against the Gorn and Kzinti.[19] Making him chief of Starfleet Operations was another easy win for Shukar; unlike all the other candidates, Nogura wanted to do it. Promoting Rittenhouse and Nogura at the same time was a calculated risk, however.They hated each other, for many, many reasons.
Rittenhouse thought the Nogura was an overbearing pencil pusher and manipulator who was out for his job, or worse; some form of Dissolutionist Anti-Federation Activist. Nogura thought Rittenhouse was an idiot. In some ways, promoting one in San Francisco and another on the frontier was a godsend, because it meant that they were rarely in the same room.[20] On the other hand, their new commands opened whole new fronts in their ongoing memo wars. Nogura thought Rittenhouse’s focus on heavy combat squadrons and rigid doctrinal structures was too military and cumbersome; Rittenhouse thought Nogura’s top-to-bottom restructuring of Starfleet Operations was some sort of scheme to undermine Klingon Command. Shukar, when he wasn’t ordering them to stop it, found it amusing.
As much as Shukar favoured Rittenhouse’s approach, it was difficult to argue with many of “the Grand Old Man’s” points; he tended to be right, even when he preferred not to be. Shukar couldn’t argue with shifting Operations into new facilities in London, Kyoto, and Tel Aviv, or with centralising Starbase and outpost support ops into a new Shore Operations department. Even Rittenhouse couldn’t argue with Nogura having the final say over the movement of fleet tenders and support craft when only Nogura knew their full capabilities. It certainly helped that Nogura’s reforms and budget reductions were a godsend to Commander, Starfleet in his battle with the Allocations Committee. Even Rittenhouse had to admit that “we wouldn’t have gotten the Federation Class without those reforms.”
So, Operations would modernise, slowly, on Nogura’s terms. In the meantime, however, Nogura’s second hat – as chair of the IPC – continued to leak into the work of his own staff. Very quickly, Peter Toussaint found himself attending Intelligence meetings at Starfleet Planning Operations in London. His life quickly shifted into the shadowy, grim world of the IPC, where knowledge and information came from sources best left unmentioned. Gone were the days of the Sage wizard of Argelius delivering omens of Klingon fleet movements as were the mismatched and overlapping jurisdictions of the old days. Nogura’s iron will had already bent Starfleet Intelligence into shape over the long winter of 60 and 61. The IPC’s power had been strengthened, and a generation of middling agents had been surpassed by the veteran exploratory officers of the 50s. Nogura’s key impact was the formal division of Intelligence into Covert Operations, Overt Operations and SIGNIT – the latter two of which also worked directly with Starfleet Operations and Tactical Command. The new intelligence service was able to, for the first time, deftly combine information from field officers, embassy attaches, listening posts and long-range scouts.
The unified picture was not good. The opening months of 2261 had seen a clear shift towards directed, planned and unified attacks on the treaty zone. Border raids in the Hiromi Sector were delivered in conjunction with landings on planetoids and the establishment of forward operating bases. Klingon commanders were learning from their mistakes and learning their way through the difficult spatial terrain to avoid Starfleet Patrols. “The Klingon application of military force has become more focused and deliberate,” noted an IPC report from March 11th 2261. “The Imperial Navy’s capability for force concentration and maintenance has rapidly outstripped previous estimates and assumptions threefold.”[21] SI’s previous understandings were rapidly becoming out of date. Mastocal – considering a write-off for the Imperial Navy due to its devastation during the revolution – was host to nearly 45 warships at the start of 2261, including 10 D7s and 5 D10 heavy cruisers.[22] It didn’t matter that this element of 2nd Fleet Group’s battle line was operating at the edge of its range (mainly because Starfleet Intelligence didn’t know that), or that any excursions the D7s made into the disputed area were dependent on the Empire’s fleet of slow, hulking tankers.[23] The fact that a D7 could only lurk in a space lane for twenty hours at a time was irrelevant; it was there in the first place.
The limited but decisive capabilities of the new Klingon fleet were made all too apparent in the Bregat Massacre. While the Tandaran government was by the 2260s almost entirely in the Empire’s orbit, large elements of its military elite remained hesitant about their new friends, especially as Klingon advisors and officers began to subvert and replace them in the military hierarchy.[24] A group of junior officers, in conjunction with law enforcement groups and politicians, began to plot a coup d’état against the pro-Klingon government. Klingon Military Intelligence, however, discovered the plot in its final stages, when the Tandaran officers made a botched attempt to steal a Klingon D4 from a shipyard in Tandar’s orbit.
With control over Tandar threatened, the Empire acted quickly. Three days before the scheduled start of the coup, three D7s appeared over the Tandaran moon of Bregat, and opened fire without warning. In under four standard hours, the three cruisers destroyed almost all the coup plotters’ ships on the ground, as well as much of the smaller continent of the moon. A follow-up descent by Imperial marines saw the rest of the plotters killed or captured. In total, over 35,000 civilians were killed by the Klingon fleet to stop 800 people. Further roundups on Tandar itself – made without the authorisation of the Tandaran government – saw the arrest and detaining of another 24,000 people, and the executions of nearly 2,600 for “treason against the allies of the Klingon Empire.”[25] The message to the galaxy was simple: do not threaten the Klingon order.
The Bregat massacre was met with horror in the Federation, and added to the calls for action that filled the council chambers in early 2261. Tensions were even further inflamed by the Ipolvite Scandal when an investigation by the San Francisco Herald proved that the Tellarite Ipolvite Company was supplying heavy metals and industrial computer equipment to the Klingon Empire through third parties. The more conservative and aggressive ends of the council railed against such “unpatriotic” trade. “We cannot abide a situation where the disruptors that were turned on Bregat were built with Terra Novan steel”, said Centauran Ambassador Jerdak “and controlled by Tiburonian computers! We have a responsibility to the galaxy at large that goes beyond high-minded words!”
It wasn’t just the Ipolyite Company though. Cross-border trade – as dangerous as it was – was a crucial part of the local economies of the border regions. For those who still dealt with money and monetary economies, it was a totally unavoidable part of their lives. The Empire was a crucial trade partner. It was also, however, a bully, a cheat, and a liar, who was just as willing to kill you and steal your wares as it was to do a fair deal. “Klingons talk of honour more than thieves, but most of them have less in their hearts,” remarked Robert Fox. “You only get the honour out of them when the trickery stops working.”
It was inarguable that the concentration in Klingon commerce raiding was tied to the post-Caleb Iv shift away from the border trade; the fact that Klingon attack groups now brought tugs, extra crews and automated navigation systems with them to steer their prizes back to the Empire was yet another way in which the Empire maintained the Klingon order by force. For the Federation, constant attacks on civilian shipping were more than just a strategic concern. For many, the whole reason you abided by Federation laws on preservation, customs and civil rights was that it offered a large, free and safe single market; if the UFP – and Starfleet – could not guarantee the security of the marketplace, there were little reasons for regimes like the Elasians, the Mazarites or the Regulans to tolerate the political restrictions they operated within.
By May 2261, the step-up in Klingon raiding was accompanied by increasing shakedowns from Klingon diplomats, who promised better trade agreements (and an end to “illegal piracy” if neutrals and affiliate worlds broke away from the Federation. The UFP had no real answer to this, especially for further afield neutrals like the Asparax worlds or the Barolians. The Klingons were reliable trade partners if you shut up and did what they said. Starfleet had rules and regulations for trade – books upon books of them, designed to ensure total compliance across all 80-odd members and the dozens of associate worlds. It was a nightmare for the diplomatic corps, who were forced to make a lot of promises they’d regret; most infamous, of course, was the Gyatso-Plasus pact, which promised hastened Ardanan membership in exchange for the federal government turning a blind eye to any sentient rights’ abuses on the planet.[26]
Political pressure continued to build for a firmer response, however. Demands for Starfleet to meet the Imperial Fleet grew more vocal even as the Council vetoed new construction targets and pushed for a re-emphasis on the exploratory mission. Th’rhahlat’s sway with the OSFP and its outliers was in steady decline after the Broadhurst compromise, and despite their beliefs in stronger defence forces, they were unwilling to throw their weight behind any bill coming out of the president’s office. Many of the radicals were beginning to blame Paris for the ongoing trade crisis, aligning themselves with the more reactionary elements of the council who continued to argue for a hardline approach to the Klingon Empire.
They were aided by the complete failure of dialogue through the Orion embassies. Kuvec’s attitude to the Federation – and HW Rogers – seemed to have hardened over the winter of 2260, spurred on by Sturka’s clean sweep of the diplomatic corps and the insertion of various MIS operatives into the embassy. There was no room for Rogers to offer compromises on strategic moons or concessions on trade access that could abate the constant raids into Federation territory. It was increasingly clear that the Federation had squandered the brief détente during the Raktajino Revolution. “Our chance to neuter Imperial power was wasted,” lamented Robert Fox in his memoirs. “The Starfleet, powerful as it was, was no more than an invisible deterrent to the Klingons; ready to fight them, but without the power or presence to persuade the Klingons not to fight in the first place.”
Now, with central authority restored and the military bureaucracy stronger than ever, there was no place for “Peace with Honour.” Kuvec’s role was no longer one of negotiation, but one of pressure – to keep the UFP guessing at the Empire’s goals, and unaware of their strategies.[27] There were some, including Rogers, who were beginning to understand that place of the “undeclared fronts” within the diplomatic sphere, but they were still subservient to those who insisted on ceasefires and boundary negotiations. The Federation was yet to understand that Klingon Diplomacy was merely another weapon of war, but they would learn.
The reactionaries were almost pleased with the Klingon intransigence. As much as they enjoyed Th’rhahlat’s more aggressive approach to defence, they baulked at his attempts to bring the Empire to some form of negotiation. Members like Ambassador Pillarq (Zakdorn) and Wilson (Terra Nova) seemed to enjoy hearing the news of yet another rejected peace conference, at the same time that they decried the inability of the government to “bring the bullies to the table.” The hypocrisy of it all annoyed Ken Wescott to no end, who waded deep into the political quagmire after he was nominated to be Earth’s Ambassador to the Federation Council in 2261.
It had been a mild shock when Earth Prime Minister Jing had offered Wescott her nomination. He had not expected a return to electoral politics so soon, and especially not in such an important position, but in retrospect, it was hardly a surprise. Jing’s landslide victory in January 2261 was one of the first reactions to the Broadhurst compromise and represented a revolt by the traditionally predictable voters of earth against the Progressive Party. Jing – the first earth president born in one of the Lagrange point orbital colonies – was a massive supporter of the Colonial Reform Bill. Her full-throated support of the bill (to the point of near fanaticism) earned her a sweeping majority in the assembly but wrecked her relationship with sitting Ambassador Siobhan Tilly, who would hand in her resignation the day after the election, vacating her council seat to take up full-time diplomatic work.
Wescott – though a left-field choice, compared with other options like up-and-coming star Robert Fox or the maverick culture minister Penelope Homer – was well known to the General Assembly, and despite his association with Barreuco was seen by most as “new blood”: something that everyone agreed was necessary for the new decade. “[Tilly] was a competent politician, but not a particularly inspiring one,” wrote Wescott of his predecessor. “It was less that she struggled with that sort of leadership and more that she didn’t think it was necessary.” Wescott, however, came to the council with more than quiet competence: he came with a new view of Federal politics that promised to bring new energy to the UFP. “We all liked Ken”, one of his later allies commented. “He seemed to give a damn about what the rest of us were thinking, which was exciting.”[28]
“We have this belief in the Federation that we are here to better ourselves and our society. This is not a bad belief – in fact, I think it’s the most important one we have. Change is a vital, important part of life. We all know that. In fact, this assembly – this body – this system of government – is a testament to our desire to change and grow. In this hall, we reunited the globe after the end of the third world war. In this hall, we created the first true one-world government, and government of the people, by the people, for the people. We eliminated hunger, disease, poverty and want. We voted to create and join the Federation. We embodied our beliefs in the Federation Charter, shared them and improved upon them with the aid of our allies and friends.
That Charter, built on the bedrock of the United Earth Charter, The UN Charter, the League Covenant and a dozen documents before it, is a monument to progress we as a society are able to make. And that progress should not end in this hall. It should end where the air above us ends, on the edge of space. And it should not end on the edge of the Treaty Zone. That spirit of progress – that spirit of liberty and of betterment – should not be a luxury. It should be a right – a right every sentient being is entitled to!
That charter – that great charter – is a document of progress, but like us, it’s progress is not over. It’s ability – nay, need to change is part of what this United Earth - this United Federation of Planets – is founded upon. Growth. Discovery. Diversity of thought, belief and ideal. And unless we are willing to change the charter with our ever-changing society – and do what is necessary to defend ourselves – then everything we have fought for will have been for nothing.”[29]
Wescott’s nomination to the council passed with a resounding majority, with only the significantly reduced Federalist and Progressive Parties voting for the opposing candidates. Within two weeks, he found himself in Paris, swearing an oath upon a copy of the Federation Charter to uphold its principles and serve the people of the United Federation Planets. It was a resounding turnaround in his career and propelled the burgeoning Charterite movement to quadrant-wide notoriety. FNN would dub Wescott “The Fresh Face of Reform”, much to the chagrin of established radicals like Nafros Xaall. The new earth ambassador had hoped to dive straight into political reform after his appointment. However, this was not to be.
“It wasn’t a surprise to find out reform would have to wait. It always does. In this case,” he pondered in his memoir, “it was side-lined by the economics of war – and most critically, the economics of preventing war.” Wescott’s first debate would not be on the fate of the Federation Charter. Instead, it would be on the morality (and constitutionality) of spatial minelaying; and, more concerningly to Wescott, the institution of an economic embargo.
[1] For a detailed study of the effects of subspace eddys and currents on galactic history, there is no better place to start than Miklen Okum’s The Boundless Currents (Rigel: ‘Rij’il-Wermus Press, 2320).
[2] The Imperial Marines are the shock troops of the Klingon Navy; unlike the ground forces of the Klingon Army, they are all volunteers.
[3] The “38th Parallel” was the boundary line between the old earth states of north and south Korea before the 1950-53 Korean Brush War. Considering the similarities in environment, as well as the naming of the outpost after a famous Korean War battle, it is unsurprising that the UFP Marines chose to nickname the planet (and several locations on it) after that region of old earth. By 2267, Mardikan II’s frontline included locations like ‘Gloucester Hill’, ‘Quejongbu’, ‘Imjin River’ and ‘Kim Il Ridge’.
[4] The Fusilier Regiment can draw its lineage back to Old Britain’s 17th century. Like all United Earth Ground Forces, it was amalgamated into the Combined Armed Forces of the Federation in 2170.
[5] MACO – Military Assault Command Operations – is an abbreviation for the special operations arm of the Federation Combined Armed Forces. While the Earth MACOs were folded into the Starfleet in the 2160s, the unit was reformed in the early 2200s. As they operated more frequently with Starfleet than the rest of the FCAF, their name tended to be used as shorthand for all Federation Forces.
[6] Pop-gun is the nickname for the chemical-based artillery pieces used by both the Klingon army and Federation Forces. Despite the ancient technology at the heart of such weapons, they were preferred by most armies over photon grenades and shells as their explosive effects could be controlled more effectively.
[7] Starfleet Command would not issue anti-shrapnel headgear to personnel until 2265.
[8] Zym, Son of T’ai, Recollections, (Kling, 2276, republished Khartoum, Interstellar Annals,2299)
[9] Kheimix, The Death Throes of Honour: The War of the Payslip, 2260-62. (Rigel II: The Federal-Rigel Press, 2310)
[10] Naval Planning Directive A16-Q, Imperial Klingon Navy Command, 2260-61.
[11] Starfleet Intelligence Military Research Department Annual Report (Klingon Empire), 2264. Unfortunately, this remains the best estimate for the strength of the Imperial Army in 2261, despite being three years out of date and from a foreign power. Klingon sources do not give a figure for total strength until 2263, and most of the necessary evidence is found in sealed files within the Imperial Archive.
[12] The auxiliary forces of the Klingon Army – formed mainly from Orion, Fersan Lethan population groups – formed roughly 20% of the planetary regiments in the early 2260s. The number of auxiliary regiments would peak in the mid-2270s during the Romulan Border war, before a complete reduction after the Khitomer treaty.
[13] Cussans to Nogura in Toussaint, Starship Captain: Diaries from the Frontier, 2254-2288, (San Francisco: Starfleet Academy Press, 2298)
[14] Toussaint, Starship Captain
[15] USS Kelvin was an experimental cruiser in service between 2221 and 2235, commanded by Richard Robau.
[16] USS Intrepid (NCC-1299) not to be confused with USS Intrepid (NCC-1664)
[17] Nogura’s excuse was that he had just come from an emergency final inspection of her Warp Nacelles, which impressed absolutely no one.
[18] James Kirk to Peter Toussaint, Starship Captain
[19] The IPC was the provisional leadership committee of Starfleet Intelligence from 2258 until 2262, when it was replaced by the Intelligence Steering Committee (ISC).
[20] Sikorsky, Felix, The Lion and the Pack Mule: Rittenhouse, Nogura, and the battle to Save Starfleet, 2261-2270. (New Berlin; Tranquillity Press, 2330)
[21] Starfleet Intelligence Planning Committee; Summary, Stardate 2/1413.2 (14th March 2261). (Starfleet: Starfleet Archives)
[22] SI: Report on Klingon Imperial Navy, Stardate 2/1404.1, Part III: Mastocal, Azure Region, Triangle and Federation Phalanx (1st March 2261). (Starfleet: Starfleet Archives).
[23] Even though the Empire was incredibly dependent on Fleet tenders, it lacked fast tankers or resupply ships until the mid-2260s. It would take the launch of the N6 Morast for the Imperial Navy to gain a support craft capable of keeping up with the Battlecruiser force.
[24] Clazsk Abrenn-at, The Hollow Cage: The Fall of the 1st Tandaran Polity, (Tander, 2320, reprinted Paris; Interstellar Press, 2322)
[25] Despite the thoroughness of the Klingon reprisals, most of the senior leadership of the “General’s plot” – including Captain Razh and Vice-Commandant Lybe – would escape to Asparax. They would return to the Tandaran Colonies (with Starfleet Intelligence backing) in 2266 as part of the Tandaran Brush War. Razh would, in time, find himself elevated to President-For-Life of the Tandaran High Republic.
[26] The Gyatso-Plasus pact would be made public in 2269 in the aftermath of the Kirk Report. Jin Gyatso, the official who negotiated the deal, would plead guilty to a charge of “aiding and abetting the violations of sentientarian rights violations.” High Advisor Plasus would be killed during the final stages of the civil conflict known as The Great Disruption
[27] TK Robson, To Prevent Hell: A Diplomatic History of the 2260s,
(ShiKahr, Oxford University Press,Vulcan, 2290)
[28] Olivia Pierre-Compton, Incredible Scenes: 45 years of politics, pantomime, and service in the government of United Earth. (London: Harper-Collins-Ch’Rell, 2300)
[29] Kenneth Wescott to the United Earth Assembly, 8th May 2261, from Hansard: UE General Assembly, 08/05/61, vol1634 col.35(a)
A canter down some dark defile --
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail --
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!”
- Rudyard Kipling, Arithmetic on the Frontier
The Rules of the Game
Mardikian II is not a particularly interesting planet. It barely qualifies as a planet to start with – its size and mass are barely more than that of Earth’s moon, and its thin atmosphere bis arely enough to qualify as breathable. It has no mineral wealth of any kind; no wildlife of any significance; no population of any significance whatsoever, beyond 5-8,000 odd individualist humans who lived an agrarian lifestyle on its northern continent. The only noteworthy thing on the planet was the presence of several minerals on the planet’s mountain ranges continent that confused subspace sensors, but these were not found in any abundance. It is a “nothing” planet.
Its erratic orbit, however, carries it far out of the centre of the Mardikian system; so far out, in fact, that if one were to place a high-frequency subspace telescope and listening station upon the planet’s foothills, you could monitor almost all movement in and out of Klingon space in the Archanis sector. The Mardikian system, thanks to some strange accident of nature, lies downstream of what is designated subspace eddy 14-Alpha-X.[1] It is not a significant galactic feature – it barely appears on star charts – but it means that almost all warp signatures that enter Klingon space near Archanis, Korvat, Khitomer and Mastocal can be picked up there with such pinpoint accuracy that you can tell how finely balanced the matter-antimatter matrix of a warship is over 50 light years away. With the right equipment, of course.
Starfleet Command made this discovery accidentally at the start of the Klingon War, when the USS Archer used the Mardikian eddy to track the movements of House Kor’s Fleets. Post-war, discussions about taking advantage of the eddy had been shelved in favour of more immediate demands like trade protection. It was only in 2260, at the height of the Klingon Land War, that Starfleet became interested again in monitoring traffic in the region, mainly as part of ongoing antipiracy operations. Initial plans for an orbital station we sunk due to the inability to hide it; instead, the decision was made to build an installation on the planet itself. It took five months for the Corps of Engineers to plan and construct the Mardikian II listening post, tunnelling deep into a mountainous region on the planet’s northern continent before building a reactor and bringing in the immense amounts of equipment needed. The outpost – better known as Outpost Inchon – would go operational on November 25th, 2260, and would immediately prove its work. Within weeks, their small team at Inchon would be cataloguing and monitoring the movements of nearly 100 ships at a time. Their intelligence quickly became a vital part of Starfleet’s anti-piracy and anti-slavery campaigns in the planet, allowing the various task forces of the 2nd and 4th Fleet to monitor the courses of the raiding fleets that sallied forth from Klingon space with almost pin-point accuracy.
The decision to build Outpost Inchon reflects the sea change in Starfleet risk assessments at the beginning of the 2260s. The concept of building a forward outpost so close to Klingon space would have been considered too provocative in the post-armistice environment; it would have been anathema in the pre-war years. But the experience of the Suliban Crisis, Caleb IV and then the Raktajino Revolution underline how unprepared Starfleet was for the “new” Klingon Empire. The rules of contact were changing. Starfleet could no longer rely completely on the intrepid Starship Captains to fly the flag alone. Stations like Mardikian II formed part of a larger, comprehensive information-gathering network that began to expand across 2260, encompassing sensor drones, relay outposts, overt intelligence personnel and the spies and informants of the “Botchtok Whigs” network. N’Garriez’s network had been an indispensable source of information in 2259 and 60, but by the end of that year, it was only one part of an emerging network that aimed to monitor all movement along the disputed area. Starfleet Command had plenty of justification for this sea change. Passive monitoring would allow better convoy protection and reduce the need for Starships to engage in active patrolling. It would also allow for increased interdiction of pirate raids, in time.
It didn’t take the Empire long to figure out that outpost Inchon existed. Its intelligence had been a vital part of operations Saigon, Macao and Macao II, which saw elements of DESRON 5 and the Federation Border Patrol intercept and break up three raiding parties before they passed through the Archanis sector. Imperial Intelligence pinpointed the base in late March 2261. Initial plans to bombard the planet from orbit were cast off after it became clear that Inchon was surrounded by erratic minerals, meaning that the base, as deeply as it was dug into the foothills, would likely survive the inaccurate bombardment unscathed. While, with time, the Klingons could probably have found a scientific solution to the inaccuracy, their martial instinct was stronger. The quickest, and more glorious way to remove this garb fly would be via ground assault. The D6 Cruiser IKS Reincarnation was sent, along with 480 Imperial foot soldiers to remove the ‘earthers’ from the planet.
Outpost Inchon had a small crew. Beyond its command staff and subspace signals officers, its security staff consists of a mere 25 Starfleet Security personnel, armed with nothing heavier than phaser rifles and a single Photon grenade launcher. Their main defence was staying hidden, and at worst the hope that a relief vessel from Starbase 24 would arrive in a short time. Reincarnation’s assault began quickly on the night of the 18th of May, with a screen of photon torpedoes wiping out the orbital communications satellite before Inchon could raise the alarm. The 400 Imperial Marines landed soon afterwards. Unable to beam through the outpost’s shields, they made planetfall about 18 kilometres from the settlement, beginning the 5-hour march to their target immediately. It did not give the Security team much time to prepare; even bolstered by the outpost’s comms staff, they only had 60 armed officers to face over four times their number. It was not good odds.
The first Klingon assault was clumsy, brutal, and inefficient. The only entrance into Inchon was a single tunnelled entrance, defended by an armoured security post. A company of Klingons attempted to rush the position, only to be cut down in the open by phaser fire, with 46 Klingons falling for no losses on Starfleet’s side. A second attack would be attempted an hour later, accompanied by supporting fire and a disruptor barrage from a stationary cannon that had been hauled up the hillside. This too was pushed back, but with serious losses on the side of the outpost; all five personnel inside the security post were killed by a direct hit from the disruptor cannon. Inchon’s security chief pulled their people back inside the outpost, trading space for time in the hope that someone had noticed the outpost’s silence.
Someone had, thankfully. Starbase 24 noted the curt end to the comms feed immediately. Its CO had immediately suspected foul play and dispatched the Kirov Class USS Indefatigable and the Marine transport USS Tripoli to investigate. The two vessels would arrive three days into the siege, as the Klingon landing force began to cut through the third and final set of castrodinium doors that protected the main outpost from the outside.
The Reincarnation, a lighter Klingon cruiser, was no match for the Indefatigable and withdrew before the Starfleet vessel could even threaten it with phaser fire. Tripoli’s marine group (consisting of elements of the 31st (Tellarite People’s Volunteer) Regiment and the 11th (Hussars) Armoured Company) prepared for a contested landing. However, upon planetfall, they were surprised the find out the Klingons had gone. Their dead had been buried neatly in rows outside of Inchon. Their heavy equipment, prized artillery pieces that had been hauled up the hillside by the Imperial marines, lay abandoned on the other side of the small road that connected the outpost with the hillside landing area.
Upon further investigation, it became clear that instead of doing what many had expected of them – dying gloriously in battle – the Klingon soldiers had withdrawn 55 kilometres overnight to another mountain range that overlooked Inchon and set up a fortified camp there. It took the marine force three days to march cross country to their position, and when they arrived, the hilltop had been transformed into a fortress of its own. Recent orders unearthed from the Imperial archives had made it apparent that this break with Klingon tradition was not, as previously thought, a single act of guile and cunning by the Klingon’s commander. Instead, the official imperial orders for the operation – issued by Sturka himself – state that if the force is unable to destroy the base immediately, it is to “find a nearby strategic position, fortify it, and begin a long-term harassing campaign against the outpost.”
The Klingon base – soon nicknamed “Hellfire Corner” by the marines – was a death trap, with dozens of kill zones and cleared paths of fire preventing any covered approach. There was no way that the Tellar Volunteers would be able to clear it, even with mechanized support. After a failed negotiation, and a disastrous attempt by the federation forces to rush the outpost, their CO ordered a staged withdrawal back to a perimeter around Inchon. Even this defence line – roughly 10 kilometres from Inchon itself – was still thinly held, even when reinforcements were deployed from the Tripoli. Klingon harassing attacks on the line began almost immediately, with snipers, mortar barrages and night raids forcing the marines to remain on constant alert. After 11 days, Inchon would send the following signal to Starfleet Command:
“KLINGON FORCE HAS ENTRENCHED ON OPPOSING POSITION AND IS PREPARED TO CONTINUE HARASSING MARINE DETACHMENTS INDEFINITELY. RECOMMEND THAT FEDERATION MARINE CORPS REMAIN ON MARDIKIAN II TO PROTECT OUTPOST INCHON UNTIL DIPLOMATIC SOLUTION CAN BE FOUND.”
Starbase 24’s commander, Commodore Q’varak, issued a provisional order, authorizing the deployment of the entire 31st Regiment (with supporting elements) on the provision it was not rescinded by Klingon Command. Rittenhouse endorsed the order; as did Starfleet Command. The Klingons responded quickly, flying in another battlegroup of Imperial Marines during a solar storm that blinded the sensor array. Command authorised a “proportional increase in personnel”. By the end of 2261, there would be 3,500 Federation Marines on Mardikian II, alongside a further 800 Starfleet personnel. There would also be 6,500 Klingon warriors, both regular foot soldiers and members of the Imperial Marines.[2] Mardikian II had now become a new front in the undeclared war – at least until the diplomatic corps found a solution.[3]
The Klingon diplomats on Orion, however, were not interested in a solution. The official line was that the commander of the Klingon marine force had gone rogue and taken his soldiers with him and was thus none of their concern. It had happened before, apparently. No one bought the line, but it served to wash the Empire of official responsibility for the action and paint any Starfleet escalatory response as being “overzealous”. It was just another play in the Great Game, and a serious one too. So long as the Klingon presence on Mardikian II remained, the subspace outpost was threatened with destruction. While Klingon Command did consider a more direct, offensive situation to the incursion, everyone knew that Starfleet Headquarters (and more importantly the president) would never approve of offensive action on such a scale. Inchon could be reinforced, and the Marine battlegroup could conduct local spoiling attacks, but they were largely a defensive force. Their job was to make sure the Klingons didn’t take the outpost; not remove them from the planet entirely.
These were the Rules of the Game. Starfleet, even in its rejuvenated, alert state after the Klingon war and the Shukar report, was still a Peacekeeping force. Its orders, mission profiles, and rules of engagement were hesitant, limited, and defensive. It could reinforce allied worlds; conduct scouting operations along its trade routes and border posts; bring in heavier Starships to fly the flag and remind the Klingons of their capabilities, but they could never conduct the overt offensives the Klingons did. Thanks to its principles, Starfleet would always surrender the tactical strategic initiative to the Klingon Empire. They were fighting the Undeclared War with a hand tied behind their own back; one tied by their own hands.
By mid-2261 Mardikian II was one of eight long-term deployments authorised by the Federation Security Council. Stretched thin and fighting a more capable opponent, the professional army of the Federation – both the Infantry of the CAF and the MACOs – struggled to hold their own against the Imperial Army. “Mardikian II was bloody murder,” Patrick Ch’O’Leary remembered. “The was no way to avoid death there.” Ch’O’Leary spent two weeks on Mardikian II in August 2261, leading an engineering team from the Malcolm Reed alongside the UFP Marines and newly arrived elements of the 2nd Battalion, Fusilier Regiment (Earth)[4]. Most of their mission had involved helping to build roads, irrigation ditches and power relays along the route to the front, but 8 days into their tour Ch’O’Leary was asked to lead a group up to the front and assist in the construction of a Starfleet Mobile Auxiliary Support Hospital (SMASH) unit.
“The MACOs were riding shotgun in all our vehicles, leaning out the doors with their Phaser carbines at the hip, while their officer grinned at me from behind the controls, ignoring the whip-crash of chemical shells and the bark of distant disruptor fire.”[5] The convoy was hit on several occasions, killing several soldiers and some Starfleet engineers. “The Fusilier officer didn’t seem too hurt by loss. He shook his head with frustration and apologised for the delay as our personnel heaved the burning skimmer and its dead crew off the winding road. There was part of him that seemed excited to get back up to the front, and back into the action. His whole platoon seemed excited to get to grips with the enemy and get back for all the combat they missed in the Klingon war. They didn’t know what they’d escaped.”
The SMASH unit was located around 4 miles from the line of contact, but it was by no means a safe zone. Ch’O’Leary’s personnel and the CAF engineers worked through shell fire, disruptor barrages and sniper fire to build the hospital while the fusiliers tried to push the Klingon infantry off the overlooking hills. “The noise of battle was constant – as constant as the scream-smash of mortars and pop-guns that pounded our corner of hell all day and all night.”[6] There was an expectation that the Klingon ground troops on Mardikian II would fight as they had during the Klingon War, with mass wave attacks, brutal hand-to-hand combat and the gratuitous use of explosives in close quarters. This was not how they fought now. Even with the poor training of the new Imperial Army, the emphasis on defensive firepower (after mass assaults failed) was telling, especially to the “poor bloody infantry” of the Federation Ground Forces as they tried to scale the hilltops of Mardikian II.
“The Klingon ground pounders melted into the hills, invisible until the moment a fusillade of disruptors screeched out of the undergrowth, or a troop of warriors thundered down a gully, firing from the hip. It was utterly terrifying. You’d be standing behind a rock, safe from the enemy, and then a green bolt of energy would clip the ground next to you. Or maybe, another day, you’d be moving equipment across the compound and your every move would be followed by mortar shots with pinpoint accuracy. We learned very quickly to move like the fusiliers, in short bounds, doubled over, borrowed helmets clutched to our heads.”[7]
The Fusilier Lieutenant was amused by the sight of O’Leary and the officers ducking along with their men. “He was mad. Completely mad. I watched him lead his platoon up the hill into a hail of green disruptor fire, standing upright while everyone else ducked and weaved through the scrubland. He didn’t seem to mind the danger.” The bravery of the fusiliers was enough to clear the hilltops around the SMASH unit, and their lieutenant returned in triumph, grinning from ear to ear. “He waved at me from a small hilltop. ‘Good show!’ he hollered, waving his carbine like a swagger stick. The boy went to add something more but was cut off by a shill, high-pitched shriek. His body toppled to the floor, lifeless, his flesh hissing from where the disruptor bolt had hit him square in the chest.”
“They never found that sniper. Fusilier sergeant reckoned they vaporised themselves to escape capture. That boy cost 68,000 Federation credits to educate as an officer. He’d cost around 150,000 to equip from head to toe. It had probably cost Starfleet nearly 350,000 more on top of that to ship him out here to the back of beyond. He’d been killed by a disruptor you can buy in a Regulan flea market for five strips of latinum. That kid, who had the finest tactical training you can find in the Alpha Quadrant, had been cut down with the ease of a hunter shooting a deer. What a waste.”
The Sound of the Guns
Starfleet Command had not meant to get caught in a frozen war on Mardikian II. It had not meant to get caught in a scuffle over the St. Louis De Ha-Ha! asteroid field on the edge of the Alshanai Rift. It had not meant to divert vital destroyers and escorts into the Eminiar gap. But by September 2261, it was committed in all these places. The Federation Council, frightened by growing escalation, baulked at the authorising the commitments, but what could it do? The Empire’s control of Mardikian II would allow it to use if the for the same monitoring purposes as Starfleet, but for far more nefarious purposes. The cat-and-mouse battle between DESRON 2 and elements of the 2nd Fleet Group was over a worthless collection of tritanium and gold, but it sat right on the edge of the only clear route through the Alshanai Rift. The Eminiar Gap was a long way from anywhere important, but unless Starfleet went after the Klingon-backed raiders, law and order in the region would completely collapse.
Across the frontier, Klingon forces had begun to operate overtly against planetary installations, outposts, and colonies, as part of a new coherent strategy by the Empire to cement its frontier deeper in the disputed area. By the middle of the year, the situation was slipping out of control. Mardikian II and the Vota Cluster were now joined by sightings of Klingon destroyers within 4 parsecs of the Argelian approaches, as well as a deadly raid on the merchant marine refuelling facility on Mack-14 Beta. What Starfleet struggled to understand was the reasoning behind the new Klingon approach. Before 2260, Klingon raiding had been very random. Attacks had focused on targets of opportunity over strategic goals; profit and glory superseded anything else. The gutting of the Imperial Fleet had allowed Sturka to invoke a new level of professionalism at every level, including some form of strategy. “Sturka had a plan,” remembered Zym, an advisor of L’Rell’s. “A proper plan. Not just a desire for revenge, glory, or conquest for the sake of conquest. Something that felt concrete. And Chancellor L’rell loved it.”[8]
The origin of the new strategy – which built directly upon the bombastic claims of the “T’Kuvma Line”, made in early 2258 - lay in the disasters of the early Raktajino Revolution. The failure of Imperial forces to hold supply stations and bases on planets during the Land War had allowed the rebels to make rapid advances, and in return, the lack of large ground garrisons had prevented the swift end of the rebellion. Even as the first Klingon attack began on Mardikian II, the Imperial Army remained bogged down across the fringe of the empire in counter-insurgency operations against remaining Quch’ha rebels and minor nobles. As much as this new colonial quagmire frustrated the Klingons, it provided ample space and time to experiment and theorise new concepts about grand strategy – and the key to beating the ‘earthers’. The Navy’s victory against the Suvan rebels had been an uphill struggle against poor logistics, limited by the short operational ranges of most of the fleet; what rapid progress had occurred came where loyalist forces had maintained supply dumps for the Navy’s use.[9]
The five years of formalisation and institutionalisation since the end of T’Kuvma’s War had, by 2261, created a capable naval bureaucracy that could turn battlefield reports and concerns into something useful. Despite interference from the great houses and derision from frontline captains, the “desk-bound cowards” of Naval Command worked to ensure that the gains made since 2257 could be secured – and expanded upon. With the revolt (officially) suppressed, the Navy’s conclusions pointed towards the need for a much stronger, more capable supply system, built around planetary bases and installations. Imperial Navy planners were, by late 2260, finalising a list of nearly 70 planets, moons and planetoids on which naval supply bases could be established.[10] Notably, over 30 of these were outside of the externally recognised boundaries of the Klingon Empire; 10 were within the Federation Treaty Zone. All would need to be secured and garrisoned by the Imperial Army, which was chomping at the bit for new campaigns. The Navy was happy to give them what they wanted.
Late 2260 had seen a massive expansion of the Imperial Army, which now numbered nearly 7.8 million personnel (including 3.1 million auxiliary forces from non-Klingon species).[11] The Klingon Army and Imperial Marine force, who had long been relegated to fighting rebels and civilians, savoured the prospect of a “real war” in the disputed area. Their rivalry with the navy – encouraged in part by L’Rell – saw them relish every part of their place in the new order. Rapid expansion inevitably did not come with rapid growth in command-and-control skills. The Raktajino revolution’s impact on the most recent years of conscripts left a massive gap in the number of junior officers and NCOs, most of whom had been killed on either side of the land war. Outside the Imperial Marine corps, units were desperately short of leaders – even more so in the auxiliary forces, where units of over 150 men were led by 1 or 2 junior officers of “pure Klingon origin”.[12]
This was of no real concern to either the Army or the Navy. “The Army does not need to be precise, or clever”, Sturka commented morbidly. “They just need to kill the enemy as quickly and brutally as possible, and they do that happily.” This they certainly did, especially after L’Rell signed off the Navy’s plans to seize the first 20 of the 45 new bases they wished to acquire in the next 29 months. 14 of these bases were within the Federation Treaty Zone; most of the others within neutral space still patrolled by Starfleet. Some of the attacks were uncontested, others were complete debacles. An attempted landing within the Holborn Lilac system in April 2261 was discovered by the Federation Starship Kuznetsov. The Klingon Captain of the escort ship (IKS Punishments of U’Mak) panicked and blew up the transport he was escorting so it would not fall into Federation hands. 3,900 soldiers were killed.
This was not the norm, however. Most of the locations targeted for new bases were taken without much of a fight, and where there were already inhabitants, they were no match for Klingon soldiers backed up with the firepower of an orbital warship. Where combat did occur, such as on Mardikian II, the Imperial Army and Marines forces relied on shock over firepower and tactics. Despite having a relatively large arsenal of artillery and mechanised equipment, the army still preferred to rush positions en masse first before using its heavy chemical artillery pieces and disruption mortars to soften up a position. It worked in most cases; where it didn’t, however, Federation Ground Forces found themselves caught in brutal close-quarters battles with the Klingons. There were no short deployments anymore. The Imperial Army was unwilling to accept tactical or temporary defeat the same way the FGF would. Like Starfleet, the “poor bloody infantry” of the Federation was now caught in the struggle for the disputed area. “The FGF has lost all ability to choose its battlefields,” complained Major General Cussans, C-in-C of Federation Ground Forces in the border area. “We are merely marching to the sound of the guns.”[13]
The commitments were unacceptable on paper. More deployments meant more ships to cover the larger space, which meant more ships pulled away from exploratory duty. If not that, it meant a reduction to convoy escorts, colonial support, or another part of the Star Fleet that simply could not afford the losses. So that meant more ships, which meant more battles with the Allocations Committee, the Security Council and the Federation Council itself. All the while, the Klingon Imperial Navy grew in strength, pushing its operating areas further into the disputed area while sending out more and more “unauthorised pirate raids” into Federation space.
Starfleet’s leadership was split on an overall direction. Local, reactive responses across the end of 2260 and the beginning of 2261 resulted in a mess of planetary quagmires and overextended task forces. Rittenhouse’s vaunted DESRONs and CRURONs – still not completely up to strength – were coping better than their predecessors but were operating around individual plans instead of a coherent front-wide strategy. For Shukar and Rittenhouse, that coherent “unified objective” remained the missing keystone in Starfleet’s operations. What exactly the objective was still escaped them, however. First Caleb IV had shown that aggressive action without proper planning and support was worse than no action at all; the withdrawal from Archanis had merely shown that overextension was far worse than initial estimates showed.
For Rittenhouse, the overall lesson was that the response had to be delivered along the entire border, by all formations, with complete political and logistical backing. “It’s gotta be all of nothing,” he told Shukar in early 2261. “Once we start to draw the line, we can’t stop drawing it. The Klingons don’t stop when their operations are done, so why should we?” That sort of constant tempo required a lot of things Starfleet couldn’t deliver in 2261. It required a massive upswing in the logistical effort, from fleet tenders and deuterium tankers to new subspace relays and storage facilities. Transport Command was still relying on an ageing collection of Giant and Desert class tenders for resupply work. Their replacements – the Derf and Starmaster classes – were far more capable, but delivery was slow, and further hampered by competition for the two classes between Transport Command, Materiel Command, The Corps of Engineers and the Merchant Marine.
While Rittenhouse and some of the more hawkish representatives on the Federation Council wanted the DESRONs to operate “right on the sharp end”, the logistics simply didn’t add up. In the cases where long-range operations were attempted (such as Task Force Haroun’s sweep of the spinward side of the Alshanai Rift), vessels were forced to pile deuterium in unsecured cargo bays and shuttle landing decks, with catastrophic results. The loss of the Roanoke and the Ho Chi Minh can both be unambiguously linked to improper fuel storage. So, as long as the DESRONs were limited to their existing range, there would be no “counter-push” along the frontier. The “hard front” that Rittenhouse wanted would have to wait – and the longer it did, the more the border area deteriorated into an archipelago of Federation and Klingon bases, each with their own vulnerabilities and advantages.
This was fine, to some. Admiral Nogura, for his part, considered Rittenhouse’s “Broad Front Strategy” to be a pipe dream. “Uncle Shu’s right that we need a central strategy and a stronger tactical response,” he told Toussaint. “What we don’t need is a strategy that involves casting that strong tactical response to the four winds and hoping it does something there.”[14] As chief of Starfleet Operations, Nogura was at the heart of the logistical, bureaucratic and materiel reforms that were churning through the Presidio. This was both by necessity and design, but mostly by bureaucratic accident.
Starfleet Operations was, by early 2261, the largest and most bloated department within the stellar service. When it had been created in the Shran reforms, it had made sense. By creating a third party to control and deliver on supply, ship delivery, construction, and shore operations, Shran forestalled the creation of a Byzantine logistical system before it codified itself. Unfortunately, it was not a permanent solution. In the 80 years since then, Starfleet Operations had ended up with its finger in almost every pie in the fleet, whether it liked it or, with a purview that covered everything from the delivery of war nacelles to Axanar Fleet Yards to the specifics of Medusan-Trill translation matrixes. Every decade or so, Starfleet Command would relent and remove a department from its purview – first creating Transport Command, and then Support and Auxiliary Command, and then Colonial Operations, and so on and so forth.
Except, of course, it didn’t really remove them from Operations. Even when ALLANGTRANS and Colonial Ops were made separate departments, they still had to go through Starfleet Operations to get anything done. Even when the delineation lines were made clear, crucial bureaucratic components remained with Operation s because there was no real way to remove them. Even though the Starfleet Reserve had been a separate department since 2220, the Office of Fleet Readiness remained part of Starfleet Operations well into the 2290s. By the 2250s, the department was a bloated, unmanageable mess that was essentially incapable of central management. Its internal machinations, personal fiefdoms and internal memo wars were subject to constant ridicule. President Th’rhahlat referred to it as the “Holy Roman Empire”; Captain Pike called it “the labyrinth”. Being made Chief of Starfleet Operations was considered (in no particular order) a death sentence, a retirement notice or a sisyphean quest for fools. It was, thus, no surprise that Ch’Shukar would choose Heihachiro Nogura to take the reins of “Starfleet’s wild horse”.
Nogura was already a long-service flag officer by 2260. He had entered Starfleet Academy in 2216 and graduated 4th in the class. He briefly served as yeoman to Captain Richard Robau aboard the USS Kelvin, before returning to San Francisco as an instructor.[15] 14 years as a Starship commander – as well as a field agent of the nascent, but still byzantine Starfleet Intelligence - saw Nogura see almost every part of the Federation. He built a reputation as a quiet, deliberating intelligence commander, with the emotional range (and temperament) of a Vulcan. He rarely argued, snarled, or made a joke. Only two people ever made him laugh: his sister and his husband, whom he had married only a day after their academy graduation ceremony. He was a strange officer to serve under. Bob Wesley called him “the demon headmaster” as a form of praise; Chrisjen Paris, who served as his Science Officer on both USS Endurance and Lafayette, referred to him as a sort of “cold, but still caring older brother, who showed affection by beating up your bullies.” His crews respected him, and he respected him.
Nogura’s time on the frontier only came to an end when his last command – USS Intrepid – was destroyed by Klingons in 2243 after a three-day “sub hunt” through the Vota Star Cluster.[16] His desire for a new command is evident in the number of requests he sent to Starfleet Command; a barrage that abruptly ended after the sudden death of his husband from Rigellian Fever in January 2244: on the same day that his older sister was killed in a shuttle accident. Nogura’s diary, a constant record of his life and career since his first week at the academy, marks the 12th of January 2244 with a single X. The next entry – six weeks later – records his first day as the commander of Starbase Four. He was never really the same: the taciturn but patrician captain fell aside, subsumed by the “demon headmaster”, who knew all and loved little.
Nogura’s brief period as C-in-C of Starbase 4 was curtailed by the fallout from Tarsus IV. In the aftermath of the colonial crisis, Nogura was installed as the new head of Starfleet Colonial Command by the Admiralty; a sideways promotion that he turned from a career dead-end into a surprise statement of intent. Colonial Command – once a poorly run, ineffectual backwater of Starfleet, reinvented itself as the backbone of frontier support.
Despite this stunning proof of competence – and skill – Nogura’s quiet but bullish attitude to leadership did not endear him to the Admiral’s Council. “He’s not a team player,” Admiral Gorch would tell Shukar in early 2256. “He wants everyone to come to him and every important thing to come from him. And we won’t give him what he wants, he’ll move it himself. There is only one person Nogura really believes he is responsible to: Nogura.” The “Grand old Man’s” overreaching at Colonial Command – as effective as it was – did nothing but irritate the Admiral’s council.
There were many other things that irritated them. Nogura never met anger with anger, preferring to simply continue as if he was merely discussing the finer points of starship registry. Sometimes, when a staff officer – or superior officer – was boring him, he would pull out a padd and begin highlighting sections from technical manuals or intelligence reports. If you were really taxing his patience, he would instead start making cuttings from a physical paper newspaper (usually The Times of London) with a laser scalpel. He preferred the company of intelligence officers and defence analysts to that of scientists and diplomats. Sometimes, for pleasure, he used to ride a horse through the grounds of Starfleet headquarters and the Academy quad, much to the fury of the grounds staff. He would disappear for hours at a time without leaving any forwarding location; often, he could be found in tea shops, playing majong or arguing the finer points of galactic diplomatic policy with the shop’s elderly residents.
Despite a catalogue of diplomatic honours as a Starship commander, Nogura. had no patience for a formal ceremony or official dress codes. He used any pretext he could find to avoid memorial ceremonies and parades. He once snubbed President Sariv by turning up to the official launch of USS Lexington in engineer’s overalls.[17] Another time, he walked out of an appointment with Commissioner Hedford so he could dictate a memorandum on food security in the Hiromi Cluster. His disregard for pomp – and general disrespect for anyone who he thought wasn’t as smart as him – did not help with civilian officials either, whom he regarded as ill-informed, ill-intentioned and ill-humoured. During one official visit by the Security Council to Starfleet Headquarters, Alpha Centauri Ambassador asked Nogura what the current dispositions of the merchant navy were. Nogura stared at her for three seconds before replying “If all goes to plan, ma’am, they are all in space.”
As such, Nogura did not have many allies. “The Grand Old Man has no friends,” Jim Kirk once said. “Only interests.”[18] This was certainly true; Nogura’s own ideals and plans involved little in the way of alliances, but a lot in the way of apprentices and proteges. Promotion to Chief of Personnel just before the war allowed him to extend his directive will into the careers of many officers, promoting and supporting those he believed had “the right stuff”. Many of these officers, including Jose Mendez, Chrisjen Paris and Xana Nouille, would forever rotate in Nogura’s orbit. Others, like Jim Kirk, Angela Fukuhara and Tom Moody, found him to be a far more intrusive and manipulative character than he originally appeared, and later lamented the “hand of god” that guided them through their careers.
Nogura didn’t mind. As much as he knew people despised his meddling, he had the self-belief to know he was right. “Unlike Rittenhouse, I don’t need to prove I’m right,” he told Peter Toussaint. He didn’t need to prove it because he almost always was. Nogura seemed to know everything about a topic before the subject experts did. He ran rings around Ash Tyler of Starfleet Intelligence at every meeting they had and was better informed on dispositions along the border than its fleet commanders. Nogura once boasted, in his own way, that he knew more about the Klingon Empire than the Chancellor did; he was probably correct in that assessment.
He never used his immense knowledge to gloat, or cheat, though. He manipulated, yes. He moved officers up in the ranks ahead of others and assigned them together so they could form friendships and connections that he wished them to find, but only with the intention of strengthening the Star Fleet at every stage. He undermined fellow admirals and reached into their departments to meddle in their activities; but at every stage, he was vindicated by his success. He revelled in his Sphinx-like personality, and others did too, including Shukar. “It’s a bit like having a pet feline. He might bite your hand off, or piss on your best coat, but he kills every god-damn rodent within a hundred metres of your house without you even noticing.” At the end of the day, there were only two things Nogura believed in.
Nogura had been Uncle Shu’s first pick for Chief of Starfleet Operations back in 2258 but had shelved it when it became clear that the rest of admiralty – and the security council – were unwilling to let such an uncooperative figure be promoted. The debacle at Caleb IV had given Shukar and Th’rhahlat the room they needed to bring in “their people”. Nogura’s brief time on the Starfleet Intelligence Planning Committee (IPC) had earned him some credit with the security council, especially over the increasing effectiveness of active SIGNIT against the Gorn and Kzinti.[19] Making him chief of Starfleet Operations was another easy win for Shukar; unlike all the other candidates, Nogura wanted to do it. Promoting Rittenhouse and Nogura at the same time was a calculated risk, however.They hated each other, for many, many reasons.
Rittenhouse thought the Nogura was an overbearing pencil pusher and manipulator who was out for his job, or worse; some form of Dissolutionist Anti-Federation Activist. Nogura thought Rittenhouse was an idiot. In some ways, promoting one in San Francisco and another on the frontier was a godsend, because it meant that they were rarely in the same room.[20] On the other hand, their new commands opened whole new fronts in their ongoing memo wars. Nogura thought Rittenhouse’s focus on heavy combat squadrons and rigid doctrinal structures was too military and cumbersome; Rittenhouse thought Nogura’s top-to-bottom restructuring of Starfleet Operations was some sort of scheme to undermine Klingon Command. Shukar, when he wasn’t ordering them to stop it, found it amusing.
As much as Shukar favoured Rittenhouse’s approach, it was difficult to argue with many of “the Grand Old Man’s” points; he tended to be right, even when he preferred not to be. Shukar couldn’t argue with shifting Operations into new facilities in London, Kyoto, and Tel Aviv, or with centralising Starbase and outpost support ops into a new Shore Operations department. Even Rittenhouse couldn’t argue with Nogura having the final say over the movement of fleet tenders and support craft when only Nogura knew their full capabilities. It certainly helped that Nogura’s reforms and budget reductions were a godsend to Commander, Starfleet in his battle with the Allocations Committee. Even Rittenhouse had to admit that “we wouldn’t have gotten the Federation Class without those reforms.”
So, Operations would modernise, slowly, on Nogura’s terms. In the meantime, however, Nogura’s second hat – as chair of the IPC – continued to leak into the work of his own staff. Very quickly, Peter Toussaint found himself attending Intelligence meetings at Starfleet Planning Operations in London. His life quickly shifted into the shadowy, grim world of the IPC, where knowledge and information came from sources best left unmentioned. Gone were the days of the Sage wizard of Argelius delivering omens of Klingon fleet movements as were the mismatched and overlapping jurisdictions of the old days. Nogura’s iron will had already bent Starfleet Intelligence into shape over the long winter of 60 and 61. The IPC’s power had been strengthened, and a generation of middling agents had been surpassed by the veteran exploratory officers of the 50s. Nogura’s key impact was the formal division of Intelligence into Covert Operations, Overt Operations and SIGNIT – the latter two of which also worked directly with Starfleet Operations and Tactical Command. The new intelligence service was able to, for the first time, deftly combine information from field officers, embassy attaches, listening posts and long-range scouts.
The unified picture was not good. The opening months of 2261 had seen a clear shift towards directed, planned and unified attacks on the treaty zone. Border raids in the Hiromi Sector were delivered in conjunction with landings on planetoids and the establishment of forward operating bases. Klingon commanders were learning from their mistakes and learning their way through the difficult spatial terrain to avoid Starfleet Patrols. “The Klingon application of military force has become more focused and deliberate,” noted an IPC report from March 11th 2261. “The Imperial Navy’s capability for force concentration and maintenance has rapidly outstripped previous estimates and assumptions threefold.”[21] SI’s previous understandings were rapidly becoming out of date. Mastocal – considering a write-off for the Imperial Navy due to its devastation during the revolution – was host to nearly 45 warships at the start of 2261, including 10 D7s and 5 D10 heavy cruisers.[22] It didn’t matter that this element of 2nd Fleet Group’s battle line was operating at the edge of its range (mainly because Starfleet Intelligence didn’t know that), or that any excursions the D7s made into the disputed area were dependent on the Empire’s fleet of slow, hulking tankers.[23] The fact that a D7 could only lurk in a space lane for twenty hours at a time was irrelevant; it was there in the first place.
The limited but decisive capabilities of the new Klingon fleet were made all too apparent in the Bregat Massacre. While the Tandaran government was by the 2260s almost entirely in the Empire’s orbit, large elements of its military elite remained hesitant about their new friends, especially as Klingon advisors and officers began to subvert and replace them in the military hierarchy.[24] A group of junior officers, in conjunction with law enforcement groups and politicians, began to plot a coup d’état against the pro-Klingon government. Klingon Military Intelligence, however, discovered the plot in its final stages, when the Tandaran officers made a botched attempt to steal a Klingon D4 from a shipyard in Tandar’s orbit.
With control over Tandar threatened, the Empire acted quickly. Three days before the scheduled start of the coup, three D7s appeared over the Tandaran moon of Bregat, and opened fire without warning. In under four standard hours, the three cruisers destroyed almost all the coup plotters’ ships on the ground, as well as much of the smaller continent of the moon. A follow-up descent by Imperial marines saw the rest of the plotters killed or captured. In total, over 35,000 civilians were killed by the Klingon fleet to stop 800 people. Further roundups on Tandar itself – made without the authorisation of the Tandaran government – saw the arrest and detaining of another 24,000 people, and the executions of nearly 2,600 for “treason against the allies of the Klingon Empire.”[25] The message to the galaxy was simple: do not threaten the Klingon order.
The Bregat massacre was met with horror in the Federation, and added to the calls for action that filled the council chambers in early 2261. Tensions were even further inflamed by the Ipolvite Scandal when an investigation by the San Francisco Herald proved that the Tellarite Ipolvite Company was supplying heavy metals and industrial computer equipment to the Klingon Empire through third parties. The more conservative and aggressive ends of the council railed against such “unpatriotic” trade. “We cannot abide a situation where the disruptors that were turned on Bregat were built with Terra Novan steel”, said Centauran Ambassador Jerdak “and controlled by Tiburonian computers! We have a responsibility to the galaxy at large that goes beyond high-minded words!”
It wasn’t just the Ipolyite Company though. Cross-border trade – as dangerous as it was – was a crucial part of the local economies of the border regions. For those who still dealt with money and monetary economies, it was a totally unavoidable part of their lives. The Empire was a crucial trade partner. It was also, however, a bully, a cheat, and a liar, who was just as willing to kill you and steal your wares as it was to do a fair deal. “Klingons talk of honour more than thieves, but most of them have less in their hearts,” remarked Robert Fox. “You only get the honour out of them when the trickery stops working.”
It was inarguable that the concentration in Klingon commerce raiding was tied to the post-Caleb Iv shift away from the border trade; the fact that Klingon attack groups now brought tugs, extra crews and automated navigation systems with them to steer their prizes back to the Empire was yet another way in which the Empire maintained the Klingon order by force. For the Federation, constant attacks on civilian shipping were more than just a strategic concern. For many, the whole reason you abided by Federation laws on preservation, customs and civil rights was that it offered a large, free and safe single market; if the UFP – and Starfleet – could not guarantee the security of the marketplace, there were little reasons for regimes like the Elasians, the Mazarites or the Regulans to tolerate the political restrictions they operated within.
By May 2261, the step-up in Klingon raiding was accompanied by increasing shakedowns from Klingon diplomats, who promised better trade agreements (and an end to “illegal piracy” if neutrals and affiliate worlds broke away from the Federation. The UFP had no real answer to this, especially for further afield neutrals like the Asparax worlds or the Barolians. The Klingons were reliable trade partners if you shut up and did what they said. Starfleet had rules and regulations for trade – books upon books of them, designed to ensure total compliance across all 80-odd members and the dozens of associate worlds. It was a nightmare for the diplomatic corps, who were forced to make a lot of promises they’d regret; most infamous, of course, was the Gyatso-Plasus pact, which promised hastened Ardanan membership in exchange for the federal government turning a blind eye to any sentient rights’ abuses on the planet.[26]
Political pressure continued to build for a firmer response, however. Demands for Starfleet to meet the Imperial Fleet grew more vocal even as the Council vetoed new construction targets and pushed for a re-emphasis on the exploratory mission. Th’rhahlat’s sway with the OSFP and its outliers was in steady decline after the Broadhurst compromise, and despite their beliefs in stronger defence forces, they were unwilling to throw their weight behind any bill coming out of the president’s office. Many of the radicals were beginning to blame Paris for the ongoing trade crisis, aligning themselves with the more reactionary elements of the council who continued to argue for a hardline approach to the Klingon Empire.
They were aided by the complete failure of dialogue through the Orion embassies. Kuvec’s attitude to the Federation – and HW Rogers – seemed to have hardened over the winter of 2260, spurred on by Sturka’s clean sweep of the diplomatic corps and the insertion of various MIS operatives into the embassy. There was no room for Rogers to offer compromises on strategic moons or concessions on trade access that could abate the constant raids into Federation territory. It was increasingly clear that the Federation had squandered the brief détente during the Raktajino Revolution. “Our chance to neuter Imperial power was wasted,” lamented Robert Fox in his memoirs. “The Starfleet, powerful as it was, was no more than an invisible deterrent to the Klingons; ready to fight them, but without the power or presence to persuade the Klingons not to fight in the first place.”
Now, with central authority restored and the military bureaucracy stronger than ever, there was no place for “Peace with Honour.” Kuvec’s role was no longer one of negotiation, but one of pressure – to keep the UFP guessing at the Empire’s goals, and unaware of their strategies.[27] There were some, including Rogers, who were beginning to understand that place of the “undeclared fronts” within the diplomatic sphere, but they were still subservient to those who insisted on ceasefires and boundary negotiations. The Federation was yet to understand that Klingon Diplomacy was merely another weapon of war, but they would learn.
The reactionaries were almost pleased with the Klingon intransigence. As much as they enjoyed Th’rhahlat’s more aggressive approach to defence, they baulked at his attempts to bring the Empire to some form of negotiation. Members like Ambassador Pillarq (Zakdorn) and Wilson (Terra Nova) seemed to enjoy hearing the news of yet another rejected peace conference, at the same time that they decried the inability of the government to “bring the bullies to the table.” The hypocrisy of it all annoyed Ken Wescott to no end, who waded deep into the political quagmire after he was nominated to be Earth’s Ambassador to the Federation Council in 2261.
It had been a mild shock when Earth Prime Minister Jing had offered Wescott her nomination. He had not expected a return to electoral politics so soon, and especially not in such an important position, but in retrospect, it was hardly a surprise. Jing’s landslide victory in January 2261 was one of the first reactions to the Broadhurst compromise and represented a revolt by the traditionally predictable voters of earth against the Progressive Party. Jing – the first earth president born in one of the Lagrange point orbital colonies – was a massive supporter of the Colonial Reform Bill. Her full-throated support of the bill (to the point of near fanaticism) earned her a sweeping majority in the assembly but wrecked her relationship with sitting Ambassador Siobhan Tilly, who would hand in her resignation the day after the election, vacating her council seat to take up full-time diplomatic work.
Wescott – though a left-field choice, compared with other options like up-and-coming star Robert Fox or the maverick culture minister Penelope Homer – was well known to the General Assembly, and despite his association with Barreuco was seen by most as “new blood”: something that everyone agreed was necessary for the new decade. “[Tilly] was a competent politician, but not a particularly inspiring one,” wrote Wescott of his predecessor. “It was less that she struggled with that sort of leadership and more that she didn’t think it was necessary.” Wescott, however, came to the council with more than quiet competence: he came with a new view of Federal politics that promised to bring new energy to the UFP. “We all liked Ken”, one of his later allies commented. “He seemed to give a damn about what the rest of us were thinking, which was exciting.”[28]
“We have this belief in the Federation that we are here to better ourselves and our society. This is not a bad belief – in fact, I think it’s the most important one we have. Change is a vital, important part of life. We all know that. In fact, this assembly – this body – this system of government – is a testament to our desire to change and grow. In this hall, we reunited the globe after the end of the third world war. In this hall, we created the first true one-world government, and government of the people, by the people, for the people. We eliminated hunger, disease, poverty and want. We voted to create and join the Federation. We embodied our beliefs in the Federation Charter, shared them and improved upon them with the aid of our allies and friends.
That Charter, built on the bedrock of the United Earth Charter, The UN Charter, the League Covenant and a dozen documents before it, is a monument to progress we as a society are able to make. And that progress should not end in this hall. It should end where the air above us ends, on the edge of space. And it should not end on the edge of the Treaty Zone. That spirit of progress – that spirit of liberty and of betterment – should not be a luxury. It should be a right – a right every sentient being is entitled to!
That charter – that great charter – is a document of progress, but like us, it’s progress is not over. It’s ability – nay, need to change is part of what this United Earth - this United Federation of Planets – is founded upon. Growth. Discovery. Diversity of thought, belief and ideal. And unless we are willing to change the charter with our ever-changing society – and do what is necessary to defend ourselves – then everything we have fought for will have been for nothing.”[29]
Wescott’s nomination to the council passed with a resounding majority, with only the significantly reduced Federalist and Progressive Parties voting for the opposing candidates. Within two weeks, he found himself in Paris, swearing an oath upon a copy of the Federation Charter to uphold its principles and serve the people of the United Federation Planets. It was a resounding turnaround in his career and propelled the burgeoning Charterite movement to quadrant-wide notoriety. FNN would dub Wescott “The Fresh Face of Reform”, much to the chagrin of established radicals like Nafros Xaall. The new earth ambassador had hoped to dive straight into political reform after his appointment. However, this was not to be.
“It wasn’t a surprise to find out reform would have to wait. It always does. In this case,” he pondered in his memoir, “it was side-lined by the economics of war – and most critically, the economics of preventing war.” Wescott’s first debate would not be on the fate of the Federation Charter. Instead, it would be on the morality (and constitutionality) of spatial minelaying; and, more concerningly to Wescott, the institution of an economic embargo.
[1] For a detailed study of the effects of subspace eddys and currents on galactic history, there is no better place to start than Miklen Okum’s The Boundless Currents (Rigel: ‘Rij’il-Wermus Press, 2320).
[2] The Imperial Marines are the shock troops of the Klingon Navy; unlike the ground forces of the Klingon Army, they are all volunteers.
[3] The “38th Parallel” was the boundary line between the old earth states of north and south Korea before the 1950-53 Korean Brush War. Considering the similarities in environment, as well as the naming of the outpost after a famous Korean War battle, it is unsurprising that the UFP Marines chose to nickname the planet (and several locations on it) after that region of old earth. By 2267, Mardikan II’s frontline included locations like ‘Gloucester Hill’, ‘Quejongbu’, ‘Imjin River’ and ‘Kim Il Ridge’.
[4] The Fusilier Regiment can draw its lineage back to Old Britain’s 17th century. Like all United Earth Ground Forces, it was amalgamated into the Combined Armed Forces of the Federation in 2170.
[5] MACO – Military Assault Command Operations – is an abbreviation for the special operations arm of the Federation Combined Armed Forces. While the Earth MACOs were folded into the Starfleet in the 2160s, the unit was reformed in the early 2200s. As they operated more frequently with Starfleet than the rest of the FCAF, their name tended to be used as shorthand for all Federation Forces.
[6] Pop-gun is the nickname for the chemical-based artillery pieces used by both the Klingon army and Federation Forces. Despite the ancient technology at the heart of such weapons, they were preferred by most armies over photon grenades and shells as their explosive effects could be controlled more effectively.
[7] Starfleet Command would not issue anti-shrapnel headgear to personnel until 2265.
[8] Zym, Son of T’ai, Recollections, (Kling, 2276, republished Khartoum, Interstellar Annals,2299)
[9] Kheimix, The Death Throes of Honour: The War of the Payslip, 2260-62. (Rigel II: The Federal-Rigel Press, 2310)
[10] Naval Planning Directive A16-Q, Imperial Klingon Navy Command, 2260-61.
[11] Starfleet Intelligence Military Research Department Annual Report (Klingon Empire), 2264. Unfortunately, this remains the best estimate for the strength of the Imperial Army in 2261, despite being three years out of date and from a foreign power. Klingon sources do not give a figure for total strength until 2263, and most of the necessary evidence is found in sealed files within the Imperial Archive.
[12] The auxiliary forces of the Klingon Army – formed mainly from Orion, Fersan Lethan population groups – formed roughly 20% of the planetary regiments in the early 2260s. The number of auxiliary regiments would peak in the mid-2270s during the Romulan Border war, before a complete reduction after the Khitomer treaty.
[13] Cussans to Nogura in Toussaint, Starship Captain: Diaries from the Frontier, 2254-2288, (San Francisco: Starfleet Academy Press, 2298)
[14] Toussaint, Starship Captain
[15] USS Kelvin was an experimental cruiser in service between 2221 and 2235, commanded by Richard Robau.
[16] USS Intrepid (NCC-1299) not to be confused with USS Intrepid (NCC-1664)
[17] Nogura’s excuse was that he had just come from an emergency final inspection of her Warp Nacelles, which impressed absolutely no one.
[18] James Kirk to Peter Toussaint, Starship Captain
[19] The IPC was the provisional leadership committee of Starfleet Intelligence from 2258 until 2262, when it was replaced by the Intelligence Steering Committee (ISC).
[20] Sikorsky, Felix, The Lion and the Pack Mule: Rittenhouse, Nogura, and the battle to Save Starfleet, 2261-2270. (New Berlin; Tranquillity Press, 2330)
[21] Starfleet Intelligence Planning Committee; Summary, Stardate 2/1413.2 (14th March 2261). (Starfleet: Starfleet Archives)
[22] SI: Report on Klingon Imperial Navy, Stardate 2/1404.1, Part III: Mastocal, Azure Region, Triangle and Federation Phalanx (1st March 2261). (Starfleet: Starfleet Archives).
[23] Even though the Empire was incredibly dependent on Fleet tenders, it lacked fast tankers or resupply ships until the mid-2260s. It would take the launch of the N6 Morast for the Imperial Navy to gain a support craft capable of keeping up with the Battlecruiser force.
[24] Clazsk Abrenn-at, The Hollow Cage: The Fall of the 1st Tandaran Polity, (Tander, 2320, reprinted Paris; Interstellar Press, 2322)
[25] Despite the thoroughness of the Klingon reprisals, most of the senior leadership of the “General’s plot” – including Captain Razh and Vice-Commandant Lybe – would escape to Asparax. They would return to the Tandaran Colonies (with Starfleet Intelligence backing) in 2266 as part of the Tandaran Brush War. Razh would, in time, find himself elevated to President-For-Life of the Tandaran High Republic.
[26] The Gyatso-Plasus pact would be made public in 2269 in the aftermath of the Kirk Report. Jin Gyatso, the official who negotiated the deal, would plead guilty to a charge of “aiding and abetting the violations of sentientarian rights violations.” High Advisor Plasus would be killed during the final stages of the civil conflict known as The Great Disruption
[27] TK Robson, To Prevent Hell: A Diplomatic History of the 2260s,
(ShiKahr, Oxford University Press,Vulcan, 2290)
[28] Olivia Pierre-Compton, Incredible Scenes: 45 years of politics, pantomime, and service in the government of United Earth. (London: Harper-Collins-Ch’Rell, 2300)
[29] Kenneth Wescott to the United Earth Assembly, 8th May 2261, from Hansard: UE General Assembly, 08/05/61, vol1634 col.35(a)