9: The Raktajino Revolution
The Warriors of the Working Day strike back
“Klingons don’t do revolutions. At least, I thought they didn’t.” – Matthew Decker.
“Oh, we’re building battleships now, are we? I didn’t know we’d made Jackie Fisher Commander, Starfleet.” – Peter Broadhurst, upon reading the first draft of the Starfleet Allocations Bill.
The Undeclared War
Peter Toussaint would return to Starbase 19 in March 2260; this time, not as a member of its staff, but as an attendee (and observer) at the largest regional command conference since the Klingon War. While Rittenhouse had made his mark on Klingon Command, Toussaint had settled into his new position at Starfleet Operations, as a semi-official liaison between Nogura and the new “Strategic Planning and Defensive Measures Division”.[1] Better known as “The War Office” due to its location near Old Britain’s War Office in London, it had been established by Ch’Shukar to prepare clearly operational plans in the aftermath of the Klingon War and had quickly found itself in Nogura’s orbit.
Toussaint was surprised by how pliant Ch’Shukar was to the Grand Old Man’s meddling, but soon learned that Commander, Starfleet was perfectly happy to use Nogura’s compulsion for planning for his own means. “Uncle Shu had far too much on his plate anyway,” Toussaint recollected. “He’d been hauled over the coals over the poor response to Gorn raiding, and even though he could handle that, he delegated a great deal to Nogura that winter.”[2] Ch’Shukar’s office had borne the brunt of the political ramifications of Caleb IV, including the Councilor Tilly’s rapidly organised and conducted Inquiry.
Ch’Shukar’s circling of the wagons against civilian scrutiny was reflected in fleet dispositions across winter 2259 as well. The destruction of the 2nd Fleet at Caleb IV meant that difficult decisions had to be made to protect internal lines of communication. Triangle Command and Federation Border Patrol had survived the crisis relatively intact, but neither had the quality or quantity of ships necessary to fill the void left by Caleb IV. They could maintain their patrols in their sectors, but no more.[3] 4th Fleet wasn’t in much of a better state – it covered over a 1/3rd more space than 2nd Fleet, from Sauria down to the Taurus reach and the edge of Tholian space. Even with the 7th Fleet stepping up to cover the borders of the Taurus reach and the Eminiar gap, 4th Fleet was still overstretched, especially after the Eaves-Beyer vessels were withdrawn in December.[4] While initially Starfleet Operations had been in favour of a retire-and-refit programme, the loss of Yard 39 meant that there were no spare parts for such a procedure.[5] Caleb IV was the final nail in the coffin for the Eaves-Beyer era. They were too slow, sluggish to turn, and consumed antimatter at alarming rates, and this was all on top of poor tactical performance. They had formed the backbone of the fleet for nearly 20 years, but they were simply unfit for the modern demands of the fleet. Their day was over.
With the total strength of Klingon Command down by a half, withdrawal was a necessity. Pulling back from the Eminiar gap was an acceptable loss that could be covered by the 7th Fleet, but 4th fleet simply could not cover the long border region spin ward of Orion and fill the gap left by 2nd Fleet.[6] In January, Rittenhouse made the decision to pull 2nd Fleet out of the Archanis sector, despite opposition from the Colonial Committee and the President himself. There wasn’t any other choice; Archanis, despite its strong links to the federation core along the “Archer highway” was the closest region of treaty space to the Klingon capital, constantly contested by the Imperial Navy and noble fleets. [7] The site of major fighting in both the Klingon war, it had always required heavy patrolling by larger ships – most of which were lacking after the losses before and during Caleb IV. Initially Rittenhouse had requested a large transfer of vessels from the 1st fleet and 5th Fleets, including two Constitution Class ships and all four of the new Ranger class cruisers, but Shukar had rejected it out of hand. [8] The Ranger was still not ready, and Admiral April was unwilling to surrender even a single Constitution from his exploration force.[9] Archanis would have to be ceded, at least in a de jure sense; the maps would stay the same, even if the facts didn’t.
The Colonial Committee was furious when the withdrawal was announced. While Starfleet would maintain convoy escorts across the sector, the general anti-piracy (and anti-Klingon) patrols would end on March 1st. It left nearly 4000 prospectors and independent miners, as well as the dozen or so colonies and civilian outposts in the region out on a limb, without any promise of return. The President saw it as a betrayal of his own promises to protect the frontier regions, even though he admitted that Archanis had always been a system too far. Most in Klingon Command were resigned to the move after Caleb IV, but were deeply infuriated by Rittenhouse’s’ near-gleeful memorandum highlighting how the drawdown would allow 2nd Fleet to “straighten its front” and “build up a necessary and vital reserve”.[10] Rittenhouse also made no fans in Paris by failing to defend his actions in person, instead sending a similarity toneless memorandum to the Council promising that “the frontier colonies will become safer” thanks to “a commitment to protecting defendable assets”.[11]
Withdrawal from Archanis had been a difficult decision. It made strategic sense - it was the closest region to the Klingon heartland, and the most hotly contested, but it was also a long way from the Federation core. Trade routes and supply lines into the sector also ran dangerously close to the Alshanai rift and Orion Neutrality Area. With the losses at Caleb IV compounded by the Yard 39 disaster, Klingon Command could no longer guarantee proper escorts in those regions. Archer and Burke class scouts were performing the escort duties of destroyers, while Detroyat and Pioneer class ships were having to confront larger raiding forces and Klingon cruisers in lieu of Class I Starships, were remained few and far between.[12]
The only saving grace was the rapid activation of several Hermes and Saladin Class ships, which had been held in mothball for much of the 2250s over issues from their single-nacelle design. The single nacelle design, initially seen as a brilliant cost-cutting scheme, had led to major issues with warp and impulse turning, that had seen the two classes withdrawn from frontier service soon after commissioning. However, advances in impulse steering technology from the Marrone team at Axanar Yards allowed for some correction. Drake had opposed releasing them, only allowing three to take part in Caleb IV, but all had performed well there. While their single nacelle arrangement still had difficulties in turning, they accelerated quickly and were a very stable platform for the new Mark VII Phaser bank. Of the 42 vessels that remained on the Starfleet roster, all but 6 were reactivated for service by Nogura, on Rittenhouse’s urging. 28 of them would end up in Klingon Command, either as part of the Border Patrol or 2nd Fleet. Amongst the activated ships was the USS Sacajawea, the Hermes-Class Scout that would serve as James T. Kirk’s first command. Time would prove them worthy adversaries for the Klingon Bird of Prey and destroyers, especially D2 and the yet-to-come D18.[13]
The activation of these light ships was a boon to Klingon Command, but their deployment remained up for debate. So far, the ad-hoc Mendez columns were serving their purpose, but the continued lack of capital ships was telling. Rittenhouse had long talked of restructuring the organization of regional fleet commands in his writings, and it was clear to everyone that he was going to take his chance now to put his plans into action. The Command Conference on Starbase 19 was the culmination point of that planning and was attended by everyone who was anyone in the Klingon region, including almost all the Starbase commanders, all the Admiralty staff, and several senior captains including Robert Wesley, Robert Stone (who had recently taken over as CO of the USS Cairo, a new Kirov Class Starship), Ron Tracey and Angela Fukuhara.
Toussaint was surprised by the cautious mood. “People weren’t exactly queueing up to get Rittenhouse’s signature, but they also weren’t exactly cussing him out at the bar, either.” Most people didn’t know what to expect of Rittenhouse beyond a big idea. A lot of the senior staff were willing to give him the opportunity to try a big idea at the very least. “Drake was a confident field commander, and a dedicated explorer, but she wasn’t a grand plan person.” Her limited schemes like the Burke Class, or the endorsement of the Mendez Columns, had been relatively successful, but she had never confronted the fact that Klingon Command was not organised properly for its status as an “overt defensive formation”, to quote a memorandum from Nogura to Rittenhouse in early 2260.
While there had been some preliminary talks and conferences, most notably between representatives of the Merchant navy and Starfleet over new convoy tactics and liaison systems, the main event was the Joint staff conference on the 21st. It was billed as a discussion, but everyone – especially Rittenhouse himself – understood it clearly as a chance for the new boss to tell everyone what exactly his vision was. Toussaint was sceptical, sharing Nogura’s dim view of a plan that remained so secret that the final versions hadn’t even been shared with Starfleet Operations. Rittenhouse liked the suspense of it all, apparently, much to the irritation of the “Grand Old Man” and much of his own staff. Toussaint, however, watched with muted interest as Rittenhouse began by highlighting successes made in exploratory and colonial support missions. “He referred to it as “good training”, whatever that meant. He also brushed quickly over the more tedious explanations for the withdrawal from Archanis, before moving onto why he felt that was necessary. A total re-organisation and formalisation of Klingon Command, on a military model. I understood now why Uncle Shu had picked him.”
What Rittenhouse proposed was a complete restructuring of the Tactical Fleet within a new framework: Operational Squadron Organisation (OSO). The Shran doctrine – based on independent patrolling– was to be abandoned, replaced instead by a network of rigid sector blocs, with clear jurisdictions based around Starbases, key planets and other major support facilities. The ad hoc Battlegroups and Escort Groups were abolished in favour of permanent formations. Each of the two main fleets (2nd and 4th) would be split into Squadrons of three types: Starship Squadrons (STARRON), Cruiser Squadrons (CRURON), and Destroyer Squadrons (DESRON), which would form organizational, operational, and logistical apparatus.[14] The Cruiser and Destroyer Squadrons would each be led by a senior Fleet Captain or Commodore, while each Starship Squadron would be commanded by a Rear Admiral. Despite the rigidity of this table of organization, they were not permanent field formations. Instead, each grouping would be assigned an area of operation (a sector grouping for each DESRON and CRURON, or a whole fleet operating area for the STARRON). This meant that ships, and their commanders, would build up long term experience working alongside each other in familiar parts of space. One of the key issues both before and during the last war with the Klingons had been Captain’s unfamiliarity with both the territory and the ships they were fighting alongside. Permanent areas of operation would not only solve that easier but allow for clearly delineated areas of responsibility for the supply, convoy duty and other tasks. It meant an end to the overlapped jurisdictions that had confounded planners from the 2240s onwards and cost many a life during the Klingon War. These designations would also allow Transport Command and Starfleet Logistics to begin putting together coherent resupply plans with specific tenders and support craft for each DESRON and CRURON.[15]
The new plan would involve a massive shift in the fleet strengths away from the Starship and Cruiser heavy formations of the 2240s and 50s towards a lighter balance of tonnage. 2nd and 4th Fleets would each consist of two STARRON and CRUON, and five DESRON. Overall, this would be a 20% reduction in cruiser strength and a 50% increase in total Destroyer, Corvette, and Escort strength. To the casual observers’ eye, it seemed odd that after a massive defeat at the hand of Klingon capital ships at Caleb IV, Starfleet was going to reduce their number. However, what Rittenhouse (and his staff) concluded, both from Caleb IV and from analysing other actions in the disputed area, was that the weakness did not lie with the Starships and Cruisers. The “big three” Heavy Cruisers of the 40s and 50s – Constitution, Europa, and Pyotr Veliky – had all held their own against the D7 and had been more than a match for the D6A and D4. Even though the Europa was being retired, it’s replacements – the “pocket Connie” Kirov and Ranger – were even better armed and had an even longer range of operations. Even concerns about the possibility of Klingon “Battleships” – at this point no more than rumours – were not enough to push for any sort of “Dreadnought Race”. Starfleet had always built its first-rate line out of long-range heavy cruisers, and with the ascendancy of the Starship Principle, it was unlikely that there would be any change there.[16] While Rittenhouse had a place for warships in his vision (and would play an important personal role in ensuring that new Battleship designs were included in the allocations bill), they were not as this stage a priority. The gap lay in the frigate-destroyer roster, which had often been filled by older Starships that were relegated to second line duties without much of a refit, or to ships that had been designed as long-range cruisers but had then been stripped down to serve as lighter vessels.
Rittenhouse’s new Klingon Command had no use for them at present. Instead, he wanted to base the new DESRON’s around purpose-built destroyers. A fair few did exist, notably the Larson and Detroyat Class vessels, but their production runs had been small, limited by civilian committees that remained hesitant to authorise such overtly “military” ships. This had been an unfair assessment – the Detroyat’s Captains, for their part, racked up a dazzling array of scientific discoveries in the Kzin and Ru’Shara sectors – but they were overshadowed by the reputation the vessel had as a “Kzinti killer”. These lighter craft were necessary to counter the bulk of Imperial fleet strength – the Birds of Prey and their larger I-2 and D-5 cousins. The DESRONs would act as the defence against raiding, aggressive patrolling, and piracy, while the CRUSON and STARRONS would provide the heavy support in case of a major incursion by the main Klingon fleet.[17] This would also (theoretically) free up the Cruisers and Starships for their main duties – exploration, scientific survey, and flag-flying.
These operational changes were drastic, but somewhat complementary to the changes that had been in the air since the appointment of Admiral Ch’Shukar as Commander, Starfleet. Since he had taken up the post at the end of 2258, Uncle Shu had been fighting an attractional battle with the various civilian oversight departments to get his new fleet reforms past. Much of the plan that had been detailed during the fated session in summer 2258 had formed the core of the 2259 Starfleet Allocations Bill, which pushed for a major expansion of Destroyer and medium Cruiser production, alongside an increase in recruitment quotas and a further allocation sub-bill for Starbase reconstruction and expansion. It was a hefty piece of legislation – Starfleet Allocations bills always were – and as always, there was a massive fight over every expense that saw the bill bounce for almost a year between the Council chambers, the executive and oversight committees that had the final say on any resource and budgeting needs.
Starfleet’s massive purview, constantly expanding since its founding in 2161, had left it with several overlapping overview committees and allocations boards, often at cross purposes. Even after the 2245 Cabinet reforms, there were still four different offices and councils that could each veto or halt any major changes to operations. Within the Cabinet, the C-in-C and Chief of Staff were directly accountable to the Starfleet Secretary and the Defence Commissioner, whose interests often clashed massively, especially under the incumbent Commissioner, Jhotha Zh'zhenoth, who was a strong proponent of involving planetary forces directly in Starfleet operations.[18] The Starfleet Secretariat, in comparison, was still in a pre- 2256 headspace, more focused on explorative assets and long-term projects than immediate needs.
On the legislative side, the C-in-C and Commander, Starfleet (in place of the Chief of Staff) were overseen by the Federation Security Council and the Starfleet Oversight Committee.[19] The Security Council, in its pre-2276 arrangement, has widely been considered a bit of a sham organisation, beholden to the permanent member seats of Earth, Andor, Vulcan and Tellar Prime and giving them far greater power than should have been allowed. This did not mean that it was a council of self-interested actors. The 2259 Starfleet Allocations bill had only survived that years’ session and been carried on to 2260 thanks to the intervention of the Terran, Tellarite and Martian councillors.
The real opposition came from the Starfleet Oversight Committee (SOC). While the SOC had been a strong supporting group of Starfleet during the Archer Presidency and the early 2200s, since the great awakening it had rapidly evolved into a restraining force, dominated by the Vulcan and Tellarite Caucuses. Opposed to mass expenditure and Starfleet “Imperialism”, their general opposition to expansion had waxed and waned with the political forces, reaching a low point during the 2240s (when they agreed to the Constitution, Pyotr Veliky and Atlas Class) before becoming more resistant again in the 2250s. They had been the main blocking point for Ch’Shukar’s reform plan until the start of 2260, when 1/3rd of its members were cycled out. In a shock to everyone (except those who’d been paying attention to the council in 2259), all 4 members failed to be renominated, and were replaced by the councillors for New Paris, Benicia, Inverness and Regulus – all members of the OSFP (Outer Systems and Frontier Party). This meant that (de jure at least) there was now a majority on the Oversight Committee for the Allocations bill.
This didn’t necessarily mean that it was plain sailing through to assent. As always, every piece of expenditure had to be questioned and compared to the (imagined) idea of what Starfleet’s goal was. The key cause of contention in February and March 2260 was Starfleet Command’s decision to cancel Project Yorktown and delay the finishing of Earth Spacedock.[20] These two programmes had been highly popular with the voters, but were also massively over budget and a drain on resources; for the resource and manpower cost of Starbase Yorktown, Shukar’s team estimated they could build an extra 10 Saladin’s and 15 Kearsage Class ships on top of a replacement Watchtower class station.[21] The Council, while approving of the cut, was concerned by the focus on the military duties of the fleet. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t approve well-armed ships; more that if Starfleet wanted them, they would have to cheat a little.
A good example of this was the Larson Class, which had been approved by the Council as a “support exploratory craft” thanks to the initial design’s large cargo decks, efficient antimatter usage and extensive ventral sensors. After approval, the Larson had some “complications”, that led to the replacement of several cargo bays with large fusion cores, along with the installation of large phaser banks. The Council, having already approved the funding, had no issue re-approving the Larson, and even supported its sister design, the two-naccelled Derf Class surveyor-tender. While this trick had worked with the Yorktown funding, Rittenhouse well understood that there was no way he’d be able to convince them to back the significant upgrade to the destroyer fleet he wanted overnight. The Squadron reorganisation itself was also an easy sell, especially once Rittenhouse explained that each unit would have its own astrographical area of operations. Eliminating the blind spots like the Eminiar gap and the Regulus channel had been a long-term demand of the merchant navy, and a large deployment of escorts was exactly what they wanted.
“It was a good scheme, irritatingly,” Toussaint wrote. “It was a long term one, though, based on husbanding what we had in case the Klingons made a move.” The destroyer primacy would have been rejected by council even two years earlier, but now, the move to build many ships rapidly would immediately see active support from the colonial committee and the emergent Outer Systems Freedom Party.[22] With additional pressure from the merchant navy and cargo haulers’ unions (whose enthusiasm for a larger destroyer roster was noted even by Toussaint), Rittenhouse’s little ships were a safe and easy way to match the large number of raiding vessels that had done most of the damage before, during and after the 2256-57 war.
There were other important discussions at the conference. The primacy of Commodores and other Starbase Commanders was clarified. The position of Starfleet vessels on independent three- and five-year missions in relation to static commands was codified, despite a massive sparring match between Captains Stone, Chandran and Beck. Very few concrete decisions were made, outside of the fleet reorganisation and the destroyer plan – not for lack of wanting, though. “Rittenhouse did talk a lot of big ideas, especially around building more Watchtower bases, monitoring outposts and some crazy minefield scheme,” Toussaint recollected. “But he held back on that, though. He was playing it safe, lest the Klingons get the jump on us. We expected a major Klingon play in the Archanis or Kobax regions any day now. The weird thing was nothing happened. Not in the month after the conference, and not for most of 2260. The Klingons were, apparently, busy.”
He was right - while Klingon warships had pushed forward into the Triangle in the 3 months after Caleb IV, the withdrawal of the 2nd and 4th fleets towards Krios, Tellun and Ardana had not been matched with an advance. There was a mild increase in privateering and raiding, but for the most part the Imperial Navy kept its distance, choosing to focus on securing local planets for the Empire instead of harrying Starfleet back to the other side of the disputed area. This was bad enough for the UFP - the securing of Krios, Valt, Keto Enol and a dozen other “fringe” worlds for the Empire cut off several vital ports from Federation Trade. Imperial Governors had soon followed across the autumn and winter, securing the power structures and institutions of these conquered planets for the Empire. The distant danger of the Imperial navy was replaced by the round-the-clock terror of the Klingon Army and Imperial Marine Corps, who backed new decrees, taxes and laws with their disruptors and general brutality. The Army – formed almost entirely from conscripts and auxiliary draftees – was well known for its indiscipline on occupation duty, treating both conquered subjects and civilian Klingons with equal disdain and brutality.[23]
The possibility of a major Klingon putsch in the disputed area was beginning to affect the President’s reformist agenda. The Colonial Reform Bill had been a core part of his electoral campaign, building on the lack of council representation for the colonies of member worlds.[24] As the colonies grew and communication times shortened, the central governments of the core worlds began to exert more control over their colonies, either through interfering legislation or, in the case of certain members, not governing them all, depriving them of even ineffective policymaking. The fact that the core worlds opposed “Commodore Law-making” – the practice of treating local Starbase commanders as universal regional justices in lieu of any frontier legal institutions – without providing any contingent replacement underlines how deeply disinterested most of them were in making the colonial regions “fit” into the Federation system.[25]
Even discussions around defence underlined the stratified political status of colonial regions. Rittenhouse’s decision to withdraw from the Archanis sector had been backed (against the wishes of the President) by the Security Council, who could do so without factoring in the effects the withdrawal would have on either local member worlds, or their own colonies. The fact was that the Federation Charter hadn’t been designed to have members like Sauria, Kobax or R’ongovia, who butted right up against the borders of a hostile power. It certainly wasn’t designed to have individual members as the only representatives on hundreds of colonies of all sizes, spread across the quadrant. Even the colonial committee was nothing more than a patch over the hole, a rush job created by the Qasr administration in the aftermath of the Tarsus IV disaster.
President Th’rhahlat’s entire political life had been centred on redressing this balance. He’d even helped form a party – the OSFP – around the principle of equal representation for colonies in the council. His Colonial Reform Bill –, wide-ranging, comprehensive, and radical – would overhaul council representation completely, granting significant powers of veto and scrutiny to the colonial committee while upgrading the largest colonies to full membership of the Federation without the need for the gruelling accession process. It was the largest constitution change to the charter since the office of President had been created, and it met just as much opposition. None of the big four – especially Tellar and Earth – wanted anything to do with it, although for different reasons. For Tellar Prime, the reason was simple: Tellar Rule meant Tellar rules – in the sense that, Tellar Prime law (and tariff law) would continue to apply in the colonies. The Tellarite government (which never really bought in to the whole ‘new world economy’ concept) happily extracted import tariffs from many of its colony worlds, while also allowing various Federation and non-Federation businesses to use them as entrepots between the UFP and neutral powers, much to the chagrin of the locals. The big Tellarite corporations were despised by most of the colonies, and while their local councils and courts repeatedly evicted them, the home government’s refusal to ban them entirely had been a bone of contention between the colonists and their leaders for decades.[26]
Earth’s concerns were far more paternal; after Tarsus IV, the United Earth government had invested a great deal of time and effort into building a safety net for its colonists and invested immense economic and political capital in supporting many of the larger colonies. Good intentions aside, it was not a popular move within the colonies themselves, many of which had already established their own identities (and political systems) before the UE government came back to meddle. Earth was more concerned about social stability and self-sustainment – something the colonies could handle themselves – than the problem they were concerned with, the Klingons. Earth colonies had always pushed the frontier the furthest and quickest and had suffered most from Klingon raiding during both the recent wars. They needed unity; but they didn’t want closeness with earth. They wanted regional unity – the ability to coordinate defence plans between their neighbours and local Starfleet commanders.
The fact that all these concerns were going through the government on Earth was a nauseating reminder that they were not, in fact, autonomous. True autonomy – the sort of regional representation that Th’rhahlat aspired towards – would mean serious and codified reforms to the Federation Charter, which the Earth Government of the day was not going to accept. There was going to be no easy passage for the bill. Even the proposition of a Babel Conference as a method to force the issue was fraught with danger.[27] The Federation was too weak to have the bill fall apart on such a public stage. If it was going to pass, it wasn’t going to happen in the swift, brutal crucible of Babel. It would have to be pushed through the council.
As such, early 2260 was an inflection point in several ways. For Starfleet, and especially Klingon Command, it marked the end of the “Shran Doctrine” as the dominant operation plan. The implementation of “Operational Squadron Organisation (OSO)” – better known as the “Rittenhouse Doctrine” - would take time, and be opposed by many within the Admiralty, but it was already changing how the fleet worked on the Klingon Border. For the reformers in the OSFP, change was much less rapid. Obstinacy from the core worlds – along with the gruelling and time-consuming process of this year’s Starfleet Allocations Bill – seemed ready to shut the reform bill out before it had even been tabled. The OSFP’s frustration was palpable after the Xaall filibuster, when the president’s once ally held up the Allocations Bill with a seven-hour diatribe about individual liberty, economic pacificism and the need for prospering spices in a Morquah sauce. The bill, long desired by everyone, would have to wait for the autumn session. Disgruntlement festered into frustration as many within and without of the OSFP wondered if the President was serious about Constitutional reform. He was – his own diaries and the minutes of Cabinet meetings make this abundantly clear – but the Constitution increasingly slid down the agenda, pushed out by the increasingly hegemonic Starfleet Allocations Bills, as well as managing the rippling economic aftershocks of T’Kuvma’s War. Keeping the ship of state afloat was a far more important priority than council reform, even to the arch-reformist himself.
Th’rhahlat remained confident, however, that the “shock therapy” of Caleb IV would not swallow his agenda entirely. “It’ll be a winter bill,” he told Peter Broadhurst, High Commissioner for Diplomatic Affairs. “I like a good winter. It’s the only time Earth feels like home.” The Reform Bill went back to the working committee, which continued to argue about the adjustments to representation and the voting systems, while the councillors who backed it began to idly wonder what exactly the point of having one of their own in the Palais de Concorde was.
Out on Orion, however, the Federation representatives had other more concerning issues than constitutional reform. On April 29th – the same day the debate on the Colonial Reform Act finally began in Paris – TK Rogers, the Federation ambassador to Orion, received a strange message from his Klingon counterpart. The Klingon Embassy on Orion had, in the five months since Caleb IV, rapidly evolved into the closest (if not most straightforward) point of contact between the UFP and the Empire. Communication was fraught, and often delivered through physical documentation under armed guard. Almost all the Klingon communiques and declarations had been delivered at the point of a dagger, the sharp point of a D’taktag driven into the steel doors at the front of the embassy compound. The note on the 29th did not come at the end of a knife, however, stabbed into the gates in the middle of the night. It came at 2pm in the afternoon, as Rogers finished his lunch, in the hands of a rather shaken looking Klingon – not an attaché, but the Ambassador himself, Kuvec.
Kuvec was a calculating brute of a man, chosen by L’Rell less due to his diplomatic skill than the knowledge that he was impossible to intimidate or sway, even with the advantages of Orion pheromones.[28] Roger’s previous interactions with him had all verged on violence in some form, to the extent that the chief minister of the Congress had stopped inviting them to the same formal dinners. This time, however, Kuvec entered the room slowly – almost gracefully, according to Rogers, who was even more surprised when the Klingon offered him a handshake as a greeting. “The hand was shaken, and we sat down. Unsure of what to do next, I offered him a glass of whisky. He looked like he needed it.” After a few moments of silence, Kuvec quietly asked Rogers if he’d heard from Mastocal recently. Rogers hadn’t.
“The ambassador asked me of a few other Klingon settlements along the border; Ganalda, Morska, Amar, Dorala. I hadn’t heard anything from then either. I asked Kuvec what exactly I should be hearing from them. He didn’t give me many details, beyond a cursory mention of a subspace relay fault. Eventually, he began to ask me about – of all things – coffee. I didn’t know Klingons drank it. According to Kuvec, true Klingons didn’t drink coffee. It was a terrible Earther drink, drunk only by traitors and revolutionaries, threats to both the Empire and the Federation. As he left, I stopped him, and asked him if they drank Raktajino on Mastocal. He stared at me for a long time, and then said. ‘I do not know what they drink on Mastocal. I have not heard from their governors for five weeks.’”
Kuvec’s information blackout was odd to Rogers, and when things were odd to Rogers, they brought it to Robson and N’Garreiez. The two spies went snooping. There was no news from Mastocal; no traffic either, a concerning prospect for one of the region’s largest trade ports. Initially, the Orion embassy feared that Mastocal had been destroyed completely; a fear assuaged by the ironic knowledge that if the Klingons didn’t already know what was going on, they would have already blamed the Klingons. What was worse was the idea that the Klingons did know what was happening and didn’t want to tell anyone. Had Kuvec been trying to find out what the UFP knew? What were the Klingons hiding? Other official channels and unofficial sources in the border colonies had also gone silent, with messages either being intercepted and bounced back by the Imperial Navy, or simply never being answered.
It took until the beginning of June for the Botchok Whigs to finally turn up an answer, drawn like a stone from a Klingon bureaucrat with deep debts. The border colonies had not been lost to some mysterious disease or blown up by a dangerous new enemy. Something much more terrifying had happened. They had revolted against the Klingon Empire.
The War of the Pay Slip
The 16th of February 2260 was the end of the month on Mastocal. More importantly it was pay out day: the day when those who earned monetary wages within the Klingon Empire received what they were owed from their labour. Pay-out day traditionally came twice a year, marked by bank holidays meant to celebrate the fruits of the Klingon peoples’ struggle. They were always chaotic, as Savan farm labourers, soldiers, craftsmen, and industrial workers queued up for their wages before descending on the markets, cafes, taverns, and clubs of the planets’ settlements to spend their hard-earned darseks as quickly and violently as possible. Kastol’lac – the capital city of Mastocal – was always crammed on this day, as Klingons from over 200 miles away travelled to get their fees from their Lords’ agents, forming (dis)orderly queues outside various offices and dwellings. There was always some unrest – that was expected – but the simmering tensions on Mastocal this month seemed worse than they’d ever been. The recent harvests had been slim, while trade with local powers in the region remained suppressed even two years after the end of the war with the Earthers. There was an expectation of a wage freeze, or worse, something made even more gruelling by the increasing collapse of value in the darsek.[29]
What made it worse was that the local garrison had been picked clean by the Imperial Navy, its best warriors press-ganged onto warships to replace losses at First Caleb IV. The ranks had been filled with local conscripts, many of whom had been dragged from better paying work to stand guard over their friends and family as they tramped through the town to receive their pay. Poorly trained, and even worse led at this point, the local Militia Brigade had already been declared substandard by the local governor, but with Imperial regulars needed elsewhere (namely, in reconquering a break way colony near Turnstile), he was told to make do. The Garrison, beyond its core of 200 or so professional warriors, was now made up of country boys, targ herders and “itinerants”, none of whom had any training or interest in crowd control.[30] These 6000 odd “soldiers” – youths, infirm ex-soldiers and the previously exempted - were expected to maintain order over nearly 200,000 tired, starving, and drunk farmers. It was a powder keg.
It's unclear where the rioting began at first. Most sources site the Durak offices near the central market, which makes sense. The cause, however, is unarguable. Wages had been frozen, but so had the “bounty” that was usually paid out as reward for any overtime work. With the rising living costs, it was really a pay cut – and large one, not limited just to the farm labourers but to the industrial workers and clerks as well. On top of the ends to various tax breaks (especially those on food), it essentially meant that the average farmer and skilled labourer on Mastocal was earning half as much as their counterparts of Qo’noS. The outraged workers of Mastocal demanded what they were owed immediately. In their view, it was their right to demand higher wages. They were the backbone of the empire: without their struggles against pests, climate, and the soil itself, there would be no warriors, no Imperial Navy, no conquests. The officials tried to explain that it wasn’t their fault – the decrees for wage freezes were only to cover increasing taxation on the great houses – but that wasn’t cutting it with the crowds of furious farmers. It wasn’t their fault that the High Council couldn’t balance their books. They were Klingons – Savan Klingons, the squires and farmers of the Empire – and they were entitled to the fruits of their labour.
The Durak offices were torched first by the crowd, which quickly turned-on other buildings in that quarter of the city. House clerks were thrown out into the street and beaten, while the treasuries and documents of the great families were ransacked, with debt records being piled high into bonfires and burned alongside legal contracts. The militia was unable to contain the rioters as they spread across the central district, with many soldiers joining their siblings and parents in the crowd. Some held firm, trying to hold the farmers back with stun bolts and sonic cannons. It was only a matter of time before someone panicked. It is likely that Aristocratic officers foreign to the planet, panicked by the size of the crowd and unsympathetic to their demands, ordered it to be dispersed quickly. Disruptor fire rung out across the main square, killed two or three dozen people in seconds.
Once the first kill shots were fired, the remaining militia were overwhelmed by the vengeful mob, who drove them back in the direction of the Governor’s palace. By this point, the workers were demanding more than just their fair share – they wanted the return of their old feudal rights; an end to Suliban slave labour on the planet; an end to the conscription of their sons and daughters, and most importantly, the Governor’s head on a spike. Governor Poroth, a later middle-aged soldier, was an excellent strategist but a terrible bureaucrat, and his rule over the merchant planet had been marred by constant corruption and vice, compounded by an almost evangelical quest to cut spending. The end of 2259 was the tipping point, as Imperial demands for an expanded Starbase and larger military facilities were covered by a complete cut in feudal poor relief, which left thousands on the planet below the “poverty line”.[31]
Deciding discretion to be the noblest form of honour, the governor had already departed the palace for the local spaceport, leaving the planet in the hands of his chief constable, a hard-nosed member of the House Duras, who had already decided the solution was to turn the garrison’s heavy cannons on the city. He would not live to see this massacre, however; a local boy, conscripted off a farm in the hills overlooking Kastol’lac, heaved him off a balcony late at night as he watched the burning city. The remaining militia garrison surrendered soon afterwards. As the farmers – led by the “Mastocal Restorative Council” took control of the Governor’s residence, they could see smoke rising from other sites on the horizon. Within a day of the first riots, almost every major plantation, foundry, and Imperial facility on Mastocal’s main continent had been seized by workers, while the Governor and the military fell back to the orbit space station. With the navy unwilling and unable to turn its disruptors on the planet below, Poroth had little choice but to skulk on the command deck, awaiting further orders from the Imperial chancellery. He was on that deck when the authorities received the fateful six demands from the restorative council on the planet below, which read as follows:
WE the collected workers of the planet Mastocal, as represented by the Restorative Council of People’s Justice, demand the following of the corrupt, incompetent fool who calls himself the ‘Governor’ of this fair planet.
These demands represent our will to restore the honour and sanctity of this great Klingon Empire, as ordained by the actions and directives of our Chancellor, L’Rell of Houses Mo’Kai and T’Kuvma.
These six acts – whose public mention and publishing would be illegal until the rule of Chancellor Gorkon - represented one of the most revolutionary acts in Klingon history. Their transmission terrified the Governor and his compatriots in the Imperial Navy far more than the rioting. The concept of an oversight council formed from the people was dangerous enough but giving that council power of any kind – especially power over the Great Houses – smacked of something far more dangerous than a simple labor outage or bread riot. It sounded like democracy.
Governor Poroth tried his best to suppress the message, blocking all subspace communications from the planet, but it was too late. Within days, colonies across the sector were in flames, their authorities besieged in their compounds. By late March 2260, what had initially been cast off as commonplace frontier unrest had escalated. The Imperial Navy, buoyant off its victory at Caleb IV, rushed back from the border to confront mutinous garrison troops that refused to fire on their own people. Even on Qo’noS itself, martial law had to be declared in the industrial city of Krennla, as unruly workers demanded: “Work, Bread and Honour” from the increasingly worried High Council. The rebels, led by the mystical (and almost certainly fictional) General Dill, had total control over several planets, a dozen ships and more. More threateningly to the Chancellor, several Minor houses, tired of marginalisation by the central government, were openly aiding and abetting the rebel groups, arming them in a bid to increase their own power by weakening the great families through internal strife. This open disunity – the exact opposite of the United Empire that L’Rell was supposed to embody – could not be tolerated.
Any quick chance of cutting the rebellion off at its head was thwarted by the first battle of Mastocal, when an advanced group of D5s and D6-Ds was ambushed and destroyed by three rebel D6-As. Poroth and his staff were eventually captured when the Quch’Ha garrison aboard the space station rebelled. They were handed over to the rebels, never to be seen again. There would be no coup de main against the Savan Council of Kling, as the rebels now call themselves.[32] The pIpyaH war – better known as the Raktajino Revolution, after the banned human-Klingon drink consumed by many of the rebels – had begun.[33]
There are, essentially, three main questions to ask of the pIpyaH war. Firstly, why was a worker-nobility coalition attacking a populist government that supposedly acted for them? Secondly, how exactly did the rebellion spread so quickly in the first few months? Why did it end as quickly as it did, without anything like the historical imprint it probably deserved? The answer to all three questions is a healthy combination of corruption, propaganda and iconoclasm: and, in true Klingon form, a healthy dose of culturally acceptable violence.
It is too easy to blame the revolts on a desire for democracy. It fit with how the Federation views itself in relation to the Empire and its ruling ideology. The idea that even the Klingon people themselves oppose the autocratic totalitarian rule of the Great Houses appeals to our own sensibilities. For the Klingon Empire, especially during and after the Sturkan period, the idea that the revolts were caused by the impurity of democratic thought, spread through the empire by perverse Earther literature fit perfectly with the totalitarianism of the regime. It is, however, not true. The rights the Klingon farmers and workers demanded were not about participation, and their grievances were not related to their political disenfranchisement. Instead, it is vital to place the revolution as a revolt against the new, centralised “Imperial” by the main beneficiaries of the old, “Feudal” order. It was not a demand for a new and progressive political system, but a defence of an old and traditional socio-economic one.
The Klingon economy fundamentally cannot be described in Terran terms. John Gill referred to it as being “Late Feudal in nature, its growth stunted in the Earth equivalent of the late enclosure period.” He cites the continued use and growth of ‘Savan’ – or Familial Service – labour as proof that the complex process of transferring away from indentured labour to wage-reliant labour had not begun within the Empire. Like most Gill analyses, the deep neo-Whiggery passes over the development of a highly complex industrial economy where indentured labourers were often serving alongside wageworkers. The M’K’llen view – that the Klingon indenture labour system is a deliberate and artificial form of “overt wage slavery” designed to keep Klingon workers out of the industrial sector (and thus prevent the development of a large urban proletariat and bourgeois that could threaten the great houses) is built, rather obviously, on the retro-active neo-Marxism of the Tellar school. It is ignorant, for example, of the economic state of Praxis right up into the 2270s, where wage labour and itinerant labourers worked alongside convicts and slaves constantly, or the great guild of Qo’noS, Mor’Petc and Quvat, who were practicing forms of the division of labour and industrial capitalism before humans had even invented the steam engine.
Constant attempts to make the Klingon economy “make sense” have essentially made it increasingly harder to dissect. It cannot be undervalued how much the economy was about “the right work for the right people”. There were certain jobs that Klingons should and should not do, and certain economic systems that were “right” and others that were “wrong”. It was not that wage labour was non-existent, or that it only existed for the privileged: it was simply that it was available for those Klingons who perceived it as being morally acceptable to work those jobs – who could find a justifiable “struggle” within the capitalist system. The “moral-monetary economy”, as Sigmund Schmidt put it, was and is an ever-evolving institution, as certain methods of productivity, income and industrial practice become more (or less) morally viable over time, with said morality often related to who politically benefitted from a certain kind of industrial progress.
While records point to an “economic revolution” in the 18th-19th centuries on Qo’noS, the mass transferal of populations to urban centres simply did not happen as it did on Earth, Vulcan or many other worlds that followed the Hodgkin-Phipps timeline of civilisational development. Klingon Feudal managers never enclosed their land – possibly because of the cultural significance of the open landscape in Klingon society, but more likely because most Klingon staple crops like the grain Qu’Mog did not require crop rotation to become more productive, and livestock farming was generally just a regulated form of hunting, which required uncleared brushland instead of hedgerow grazing.[34] Instead, machinery and the division of labour was used within the Savan system to increase efficiency.[35]
There was an urban migratory movement, but the fact was that most industrial work was conducted by convict (and conquest) labour. As we have previously discussed, industrial work was “dirty” work, without the honour or glory of the homestead or the comradery of the field. Savan work was seen as clear, moral, and Klingon – it was idealised in the way that Old Earth imperialists would idolise the homestead or the country manor. Those who worked for wages, as clerks, managers or skilled industrial labourers were often dismissed as le'wI' – wage-slaves – a pejorative that was even used by the Great Houses to decry the petty Industrialists and mercantile class, even though many of those “wage slaves” were richer than them by a substantial amount.[36] Cottage industries did develop, and across the 19th and 20th centuries these did grow into large sectors of free wage labour, but even by the end of the 22nd century, the majority of Klingon workers were not “free” workers.[37]
This did not mean that they were “indentured”. The Savan system granted an immense amount of rights and duties to those under it that did not exist outside of the system; the right to appeal decisions to the Lord and their representatives; representation and bargaining through petty courts; holy days, birthdays and ascension days off from work; provisions bed and board from their lords; the most significant right, of course, being that Savan workers were not required to work out of their homes after dark.[38] They were expected to perform a myriad of tasks, often all year round, whether it was back-breaking work in the fields, clearing land for use, infrastructure repair and construction or even clearing bandits from the hinterland.
Significantly, though, their duties could also be performed through martial service, either voluntarily or (more commonly) through the dreaded yIvotlh SuvwI' – the press-gang. Despite its legacy as a remnant of an age of noble levies, the press-gang was never challenged, especially from below, as it would mean challenging the whole system of Savan labour. Even if industrial skilled work paid better – which, as far as records go, it did throughout almost the entirety of the 23rd century – it was still seen as petty and fundamentally “risky”. Savan was the closest thing to a Klingon welfare system before the Kesh regime, and exiting it meant subjecting yourself to the whims of the market, risking a life of destitution and poverty for the chances of great wealth and profit. Many took those chances, and the slums of the first city were a testament to those who failed, and a warning to those who stepped out of the safety of Savan.[39]
To the post-monetary, libertarian-minded of the Federation, Savan work sounds like one step above slavery – a system barely fit for a world of railways and steam power, let alone warp speed and interstellar empires.[40] Savan workers of the 22nd and 23rd centuries were not tied to the land as their peasant predecessors or equivalents in Terran serfdom were. Reforms in the mid-20th century as the Klingon Empire began its first serious warp-based colonisation programme tied their obligations to the Great Houses, allowing the transfer of worker bases to new colonies without causing problematic legal battles. It benefitted both parties; the Savan workers received plenty of incentives for signing up to colonial service, often with higher standards of living and easier work, while their lords and governors were able to create sustainable population bases at a very rapid rate.
The only problem was that these colonies tended to become autonomous very quickly – so quickly, that it was difficult for the Imperial government and the great houses to use their powers to push the creation of organic industrial bases. Savan workers and their managers might be happy with a small duranium facility or a small shipyard, but the sort of large-scale industry necessary for interstellar society was not something that the Savan system was designed for. Attempts were made – most notably on the Qu’Vat colony in the 2160s – to convert the Savan system into a more versatile system of wage labour, but they were notably unsuccessful. The rigid nature of Industrial life conflicted massively with the rights of the Savan workers, which made the constant and time-sensitive worked of mechanised factory labour almost impossible to run efficiently. In the end, administration was passed over to minor noble families, allowing the Great Houses to maintain a grip on their holdings. The minor families – best considered an equivalent of a “Sword Nobility” of soldier-farmers – were perfectly happy to be made custodians of the traditional core of the Empire, especially if it meant they could protect it from the vices of industrialisation.
With the government and nobility unwilling to do away with the system during the 22nd and early 23rd century, the use of convict and conquered slave labour for industry became the norm Empire-wide. Everyone was happy with this; the Great houses maintained political and social control over the Savan labourers; the industrialists made immense amounts of money with almost no overheads for labour costs; the wage labourers weren’t forced to compete with Savan work for the limited number of competitive industrial jobs, and the rights and duties of the Savan were protected.
By the 2250s, however, the cracks were beginning to show. The Savan system had never been a profitable one; stable, yes, but not profit-generating. With the collapse of the central government after Donatu v, the general decline of the internal Klingon market that had begun in the 2220s went into overdrive, and the main profit-making engines of the Empire – the foundries, cottage industries and mines – lost almost all their external business. Strapped for hard cash, the Great Houses began to push the Savan workers harder and harder, relying more on their rights as Lords and Governors to demand more work for less pay and privilege. YIvotlh SuvwI' numbers also increased, with the number of conscripts within House Fleets jumping from 30% to nearly 70% between 2245 and 2258, with the houses pocketing the bounties for “selling” further conscripts into the Imperial armed forces.[41]
It was a tenuous solution and one that didn’t solve the fact that Savan labour simply wasn’t paying for itself anymore. It simply was not a “growth economy” the way that Orion opportunism or even pseudo post-monetarism is. Even if there was to be no great “transferral” to wage work, it needed to recover its sustainability. Increasingly, the Great Houses (and even the Imperial Government) made deals with Savan petty courts to get increased hours and diversified job schemes, with Savan workers agreeing to become factory overseers and file clerks in exchange for more personal land grants and the nebulous promise of higher wages at a later day. It was a flimsy scheme, but it worked, as long as one didn’t demand massive economic changes, inject a massive amount of unfree labour into the system or push through reforms that took power away from the local governors who might provide said land grants and higher wages. It certainly didn’t work if you tried all three at once, even if the system was increasingly dysfunctional.
L’Rell’s whole governing ethos was based around improving the quality of life for the Klingon people, with external resources, income and manpower as a bedrock on which to build a better, more powerful Empire. That meant massively increasing productivity; increasing production of manufactured goods, consumer products, warships: an emphasis on mass, high tech industry over the traditional economic core of the Empire. This was not a new concept – one does not create an interstellar society without embracing the forces of modernisation – but the Klingon Empire had always placed a serious emphasis on sustaining the feudal system of political economy even amongst the stars. What L’Rell was asking was a complete sea change in the Klingon economic order, comparable with old Earth’s “Great Leap Forward” or the post-Surak “logic economy”. Consequences were unavoidable.
Creating this new order fell to Sturka, the “First Officer of State”, whose meteoric rise to power only seemed to speed up in the aftermath of the victory at Caleb IV. L’Rell, still skeptical of the loyalty of the great houses, trusted him alone with the overseeing the industrial realignment. It is safe to say that Sturka was not a man of much economic skill. As long as productivity increased, and the number of ships being launched remained steady, he was happy. His main goal was to make the Klingon Empire productive – both as a society, and as an economy, so that it could defend itself and its people properly. His new navy plans, while still embryonic outside of the organisational changes, was already beginning to lean on rapid ship production. While the D7 upgrades and production increases had already put significant strain on the Imperial Shipyards, further plans would require a massive shift upwards in overall production, from duranium to computer parts. Increasing the size of the economy without central control was possible, but not easy, and despite Sturka’s initial attempts to wrest the financial reins away from the great houses, the Chancellor’s pushback prevented the creation of a planned economy at this stage. Instead, the production and productivity quotas were simply increased, as did the pressure on the great houses – and their workers.
Sturka didn’t care about the Savan. He was happy to pore over hundreds of reports from foundries just to make sure his plans were being followed, but he didn’t care about their negative effects. The Suliban “annexation” had been a rather successful short-term solution to the question of unprofitability, turning stagnant mines and factories into profitable ones while allowing hundreds of others to become productive overnight. The knock-on effects were, however, somewhat less productive. Suliban labour was so cheap that it essentially destroyed the consistently high wages of the Klingon “industrial aristocracy”, who were easily replaced by unfree workers even in mid-tier management and clerking positions. Complaints to bosses and the government were flippantly dismissed, with most taking the view that demanding “the right to work in a factory” was a dishonourable action. They were told to seek honourable work, and so they did, entering the small labour market for wage labour outside of the urban centres. With much more skills and experience than their Savan competitors, they very quickly took many of the higher positions as clerks, managers and officials. The Savan they replaced had become comfortable in their higher jobs and weren’t happy about being replaced by petty le'wI' who had never tilled a field in their lives.
L’Rell was aware of these concerns, and of the rapidly stagnating pay of the Savan as wages were suppressed by unfree labour. Alleviatory funding – drawn straight from treasury taxation and customs income – was meant to alleviate the strain, but (much to the bureaucracy’s frustration) the Great Houses pocketed the money. The Imperial civil service was simply too small to keep tabs on their own funds at this point, and the unsupportive nobility had been pinched too hard by central government. They needed the money more than the people, in their view. So, wages continued to stagnate, as traditionally guaranteed work was passed on to cheaper, less legally protected slave workers. What happened on that tepid day on Mastocal was the inevitable end to nearly a century of economic stagnation, exacerbated by a deliberate attempt to force an industrial system on a feudal culture. As much as the riots were about pay, they were a crucial rebellion against the “new” Empire: against capital and Noble corruption; against the rule of the army and the civil service over traditional leaders; and against the factories and foundries that were destroying traditional livelihoods.
It is no real wonder then that the rebellion grew as quickly as subspace radio could spread the news. Li Huang Rochefort, the only Earth historian to conduct serious research into the Raktajino Revolution, compares its wildfire spread with that of the 1848 Liberal Revolutions. Like on old Earth, the news of one revolt – caused by shared resentments and desires – would cause uprisings wherever it was broadcast, bypassing those places that did not have quick communications and heading right for centres of power and authority. Control of subspace relays early on, even if only for a limited period, allowed the Mastocal Council to incite revolt right across the core ward border region, where Savan labourers were joined by underpaid craftsmen, deserting conscripts, QuchHa’ exiles and minor nobles to throw out both the Great Houses and the Imperial Government by force.
Much of the turmoil over land ownership and the rights due to Savan labourers was semi-common knowledge, even within the dubiously competent circles of Starfleet Intelligence. The closeness of Klingon colonies within certain parts of the disputed area (especially near the Azure Nebula and the Alshanai rift) meant that news of the Labour Riots and the spread of “General Dill” spread even quicker there, and even spread into independent Klingon settlements in the Triangle, beginning the final death throes of the kleptocratic Independent Duchies of the Ba’Clar.[42] By the end of March, Imperial governors and garrisons had been besieged, ejected or exiled from fifteen planets, including four regional capitals and two major trade hubs, not including Mastocal. Their new governments varied differently, from the loose council regime of Mastocal, to full-blown democratic experiments, to minor noble despotism. [43] It was Mastocal that made the Raktajino the supposed symbol of the revolution. The drink – a blend of human coffee and Klingon spices – was banned by the government in 2240 due to its “subversive cultural influences”.[44] Coffee plants, which thrived in the humid environments of most Klingon worlds as a semi-invasive species, were ripped up and destroyed as weeds. Liberation from the Great Houses and government meant an end to its suppression, and as the disparate rebel groups expanded across the length of the borderland and reached into the Imperial Core, the drink spread with it, its consumption spreading like a terrifying earther parasite through the Empire, with radical ideas and revolutionary plotters following in quick succession.
To us in the 24th century, it is difficult to contemplate a Klingon government that could not deliver a swift and brutal response to insurrection. We are grimly use to holotapes of Klingon attack craft making strafing runs of villages, while shock troops break down doors and haul civilians out of their homes. It was not that this level of savagery was unseen, but quite simply that the Klingon state of the 2250s simply did not have the capacity to contain revolt the way that we would expect they could. The Imperial Navy was not in a fit state to respond swiftly. Most of the 2257 and 2258 batch of Imperial conscripts had been lifted from the farming colonies of the Fringe themselves, often by vessels returning home after the 2257 Armistice. They had not been digested well, to say the least, often enduring the worst of bad leadership and brutal conditions as Sturka remade the Imperial navy from the inside out. There were several significant mutinies in the first six weeks of the revolution, where captains and officers were brutally murdered (in a dishonourable fashion) by crews unwilling to turn their ships’ weapons on the planets below them.
By the time the bulk of 2nd and 5th Fleet Groups began to respond, the rebel factions had established themselves. By mid-April there were three main groups – The Mastocal Council, The Toran Savan-ak, the Korvat Front and the Order of the D’kTag.[45] While the first three were closer to “people’s fronts” – formed from respected members of the labouring and skilled class alongside mutineering officers – the latter represented the lesser nobility, and much (if not all) of the economic and military strength of the revolutionaries. They were, however, but less concentrated; while the Mastocal and Korvat factions were geographically centralised, the noble rebels were spread out across the empire.
Their goals were also different. While it is increasingly clear from primary source work that the “people’s fronts” were interested in economic goals – specifically, an end to rapid industrialisation and protection for the Savan – the nobility (as they always tend to) had their own ambitions. They had no real problem with the collapse of Savan rights, or mass conscription, or even the destruction of tradition by industrialisation. It was very simply that the winners were the Great Houses, not them. Their revolts against the government had been much more calculated, targeting dilithium mines, arsenals and shipyards instead of population centres. Their control of vital relay stations – seized mainly through bribery than by force – was critical in allowing the rebellion to spread, as were other “economic methods” used to persuade ship captains not to intercede. By the time the rebels finally convened on Mastocal to figure out what exactly their aims were, the nobility had the strongest negotiating position of all the factions. Even the military rebels – who had immense support amongst the Quch’Ha “unclean” demographic – could bring little to the table beyond manpower and simmering resentment against aristocrats who still shunned then for their genetic defects.[46]
There not that many details about the Mastocal conference. The “people’s councils” went in with the most radical demands, including the abolition of slavery, massive land grants, and the right to “honourable work”. The nobility were the most reactionary, demanding little more than a united front to overthrow the High Council and replace it with “more honourable leadership” (themselves). For the military faction, emancipation was the vital key; something that neither the people’s rebels or the nobles could really accept. Bringing the Quch’Ha into the fold would mean embracing an infection on Klingon society. They were radical in their own ways, intent of upsetting, overthrowing, and remaking the political establishment of the Klingon Empire in their own ways, but they were still restrained by the inevitable bigotry of the Imperial system.
The negotiations at the end of May came to nothing. Even as the rebels made further gains in the Kantari sector, and rolled by the Home Fleet towards Qo’noS, it was clear that there would be no united front against L’Rell’s leadership. If a couple of the Great Houses had broken ranks, they may have been able to corral the disparate groups behind a single cause, but the rebels were too different for that. Their visions of the Empire were far too disparate; too at odds with one another. They would co-operate tactically, especially during the final stages of the counter-revolution, but that would be all.
Did the Raktajino revolution ever have much chance of success? This is a rather difficult question to answer. The combination of the Savan and minor nobility shattered the ability of the Great Houses to respond properly, and the aristocracy’s own opposition to the central government had crippled their ability to respond before the crisis even began. If coherent leadership of some kind had emerged – a revolutionary vanguard, to use archaic historical language – then there was a possibility that the Savan-noble-Quch’Ha forces could have cohered properly. But the nature of the three groups prevented such a possibility. When the Great Houses had attempted to overthrow the chancellor before, they had done so with aims, ambitions and strategy aimed at regime change. The Savan Councils were not interested in regime change – they wanted an end to the total rule of the Great Houses, an end to the economic revolution of the last ten years and return, really to the archaic pastoral ideal of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Quch’Ha simply wanted to escape a life of martial servitude and second-class citizenship. The minor nobility, even though there were largely united in their opposition to the central government, were only really interested in replacing the 24 families on the High Council with themselves. There were people who did have plans to reshape the Empire coherently though. They were not amongst the rebels. The same military bureaucrats who had reshaped the Imperial Navy from microscopic retinue to professional military regarded the rebels and the Great Houses with equal disgust and disdain. Despite L’Rell’s best efforts, the Empire remained paralysed by cowardly aristocrats. They had to be cowed to save the People of Kahless from destroying themselves, and that had to happen now; before it was too late.
[1] Located in Admiralty Arch, London.
[2] Gorn raiding – while unidentified for most of the 2240s and 50s – was a long-term concern of South-Western Command. 2259 saw an increase in deep strikes, including an attack on the Finnibus III colony that killed over 800 people and crippled the USS Enterprise. The demands for better defences saw the transfer of four Kirov-Class ships to South-Western Command, along with 5 Larson and 10 Burke class ships. Klingon Command would feel their loss, especially in early 2261 once the “Channel Battles” began. Over 15,000 civilians would become casualties or go missing between 2240 and 2272. 6,472 Starfleet and UFP Marine personnel would lose their lives defending the colonies before Treaty of Cestus III established a mutually recognised border.
[3] Triangle Command and the FBP were aided by the accession of the R’hongovian Protectorate to associate status, which allowed them to use treaty ports within the lower half of the Triangle from 2261 onwards. While R’hongovia itself has become a federation member, most of its space became the frontline between the Romulans and Klingons during the “Villam War” of 2273-80.
[4] The “Eminiar Gap” is the colloquial name for FGC-321 Star cluster, part of the area of space between Starbase 22 and Medusa. While the region forms an important part of the Capella trading route, there were no treaty ports or federation outposts in the region until the end of the Eminiar-Vendikar War in 2267.
[5] Yard 39 was a Starfleet installation in the Tellar Section, which had been selected as the main mothball and retrofit yard for Eaves-Beyer type ships. However, in December 2259, a local supernova flooded the system with Baryon Radiation, rendering it uninhabitable. Over 100 vessels were left in the yard.
[6] 7th Fleet would be split in two in January 2260, with the 7th covering the Taurus Reach, Eminiar Gap and New Milan sector while the new 14th Fleet took over patrols and exploration along the majority of the Tholian border.
[7] The “Archer Highway” was the nickname for the three subspace corridors that allowed Jonathan Archer to travel from Earth to Qo’noS in just under four days. While this journey is widely regarded a fluke, warp travel along the corridor is substantially quicker than in other regions of the galaxy.
[8] The 1st Fleet was and remains the primary exploratory formation of the Federation Star Fleet. Based out of Starbase One, it has no overt operating area; instead, it’s vessels act on independent exploratory patrol across the Treaty Zone. All three- and five-year mission vessels are commanded by the 1st Fleet. 5th Fleet is the main tactical formation along the Romulan border. It gained the nickname “the blue fleet” during the four years’ war, when it was commanded and manned almost entirely by Andorians.
[9] April’s defense of the independent purview of his 5-ship “Constitution bloc” was backed by Ch’Shukar, who understood the necessity of the “Starship Class” being able to fly the flag anywhere in the Federation, or act as the core of a rapid reaction force. April’s thesis would be proved right during the Gorn raiding crisis of 59-60, when Enterprise and Achilles both confronted Gorn cruisers; only Achilles managed to achieve a tactical victory.
[10] Memorandum from Chief of Operations, Klingon Command to All Command Officers, Klingon Command., January 11th 2260. Starfleet Archives, San Francisco.
[11] Admiral Rittenhouse to the Federation Security Council, February 15th 2260. Starfleet Archives, San Francisco.
[12] With the retirement of the Europa and Hoover, the only remaining Class I vessels in service in 2260 were the Constitution, Kirov, Perseus and Bonhomme Richard class vessels. As of January 2260, there were only 44 Heavy Cruisers in the entirety of Starfleet; 12 of which were assigned to Klingon Command.
[13] The D18 “Gull” was designed and commissioned in 2263 as a direct counter to the Saladin.
[14] Despite their names, CRURON and DESRON units were not entirely formed of Cruisers and Destroyers. CRUON units included heavy frigates and Exploratory “Long Range” Cruisers, while DESRONs included Scouts, Light Frigates, Escorts, Corvettes and other unrated craft.
[15] While initially, Transport Command would use versions of the Antares Class, these would be phased out in early 2262 for the Starmaster-Class Tender. STARRON units did not require fleet tenders, thanks to the independent cruising requirement of all Starships.
[16] These rumours would be proved correct; the B-1 Battleship “Sto-vo-kor” had been launched at the end of 2259, after a nauseating 15 years of intermittent construction. Her sister vessel, IKS Kahless, would be built in a merely 22 months. The launching of 6 B-10s between the end of 2259 and the end of 2261 would cause a mild panic in Starfleet.
[17] The use of the phrase ‘heavy support’ for the CRURONs is somewhat of an overstatement. Until the mid-2260s, most Cruiser Squadrons (and their relative formations in the Exploratory Fleets) were primarily formed of “utility cruisers” like the Pioneer and Capella, which (despite their decent firepower) were short-ranged vessels built for support roles, not frontline combat. While the Radiant and Sentinel classes were commissioned as combat-ready replacements, the former was plagued by construction issues, while the latter was never available in significant enough numbers to replace the Utility Cruisers. Their place would mostly be filled by Kirov and Ranger class vessels from 2265 onwards. Pioneer would be phased out at the end of the 2270s, while the Capella remains in service as a convoy escort and merchant marine auxiliary ship.
[18] Zh’zhenoth had been one of the key officials who pushed for the activation of the Acuturian “Warborn” military caste during the 2256-57 war. Zh’zhenoth had also, as a junior councillor in the early 2250s, been the deciding vote on the approval ballot for the Atlas Class Cruiser. Atlas and her six sister ships were eventually commissioned (at twice the cost and three times estimated the construction time) as Perimeter Action Vessels: Starfleet euphemism for battleships, before reclassification as Battle cruisers.
[19] With the creation of the Office of Commanding Officer, Starfleet Operational Command, the Chief of Staff assumed a more holistic role, forming a vital link between the supporting and administrative elements of Starfleet and frontline assets.
[20] Starbase Yorktown was the plan to build an orbital Starbase with the civilian facilities and community of a planetary base. If built, it would have had a population of over 300,000, along with facilities to build 5 Starships at a single time alongside a docking and repair facility twice the size of Starbase One. Earth Spacedock would be eventually finished in 2275.
[21] The Kearsage was a “New Light Cruiser”, designed just after the Klingon War and first unveiled during the Shukar report’s deliberations with the council in summer 2258. It proved to be a dead-end design, and only 6 would be built before they would be cancelled. Their successor – Tycho Shipyards’ Sentinel Class – would have a stronger career.
[22] The OSFP remains the only non-radical formal political party to retain represented on the Federation Council.
[23] When the Grand Vizier of Krios refused to hand over the Royal Palace to the new Klingon government, the Imperial governor let his troops loose on the Regal District of the capital. Over 2,000 people were killed, and the entire district was torched. The area was later demolished entirely to make space for the Krios Imperial Compound.
[24] While it is uncodified, several colony worlds have received direct representation by directive/executive order, referendum or (in the case of the New Paris colonies) Presidential decree. The United Earth Constitution has, since Martian Independence, allows for independence to be declared unilateral under certain circumstances.
[25] The Colonial Reform Act (2264) would provide democratic purview and oversight over the Starbase courts, and in many cases replace the Commodore with a civilian judge (or a member of the JAG Corps) on most bases.
[26] It is worth noting that the largest of these businesses – the mining firm United PowNoq Excavation – would eventually collapse after it was indicted for illegal mining on Coridan. Its insolvency would bring down not just the incumbent, but the following three Tellarite Parliamentary Councils through long-term fallout.
[27] The planetoid Babel has served as a location for diplomatic summits since the beginning of the 22nd Century. Throughout the early Federation, the conferences were held on an ad-hoc basis, usually to solve constitutional issues and external concerns relating to regional powers. After the “Grand Conference” of 2236, the Babel Conference was enshrined in the charter as a way for the council to deliberate on critical issues outside of the political enviroment of Paris.
[28] While L’Rell (and Klingon annals) would put his immunity down to his great personal will, TK Rogers reckoned it was probably down to his HRT treatment.
[29] The darsek, the Klingon currency, was increasingly undercut by the universal usage of Gold-pressed latinum and the influx of Federation Credits through the Triangle.
[30] The total Garrison strength planetwide was around 22,000: 2/3rd of the paper strength of a “Occupation Corps”. Even though original unit was mainly forms of second line troops, most of them had already been siphoned out to form new Garrison units in the Enolia sector.
[31] A ‘poverty line’ is the arbitrary line of standard of living under which someone is considered to be living in state negligible to their physical, mental and social health.
[32] The use of the word “Council” is the best translation of available of the Klingon word, though “Unified Government” is sometimes used as well.
[33] “pIpyaH” (pronounced Pich-yah) roughly translates as “Payslip”, in reference both to the payslips that started the riots on Mastocal and the general desire to “get what we are owed”.
[34] It also helps that gagh – the staple meat of Klingon society – is best grown in small, easy to contain tanks containing the dirt the worms are native to.
[35] See Richard Williamson’s Against the Grains (New York, 2303) for a fabulous comparative study of agricultural practice across the Alpha and Beta Quadrant.
[36] Those who worked service jobs were generally exempted from this ire, as were most of the ‘professional’ classes such as teachers, doctors and technicians. Lawyers were still considered a sophisticated form of wage slave though, but this stigma was increasingly less seen (especially within the Imperial core) as the 23rd century went on.
[37] It is important to clarify that Klingon ‘cottage’ industries could scale from small rural weavers and woodworkers to planetwide luxury goods companies like Mep’lec Outfitters.
[38] This last right is most likely based on protecting the workers from falling prey to bandits, enemy raiding parties or the local wildlife.
[39] Savan labour had been outlawed on most of the Imperial core worlds by the 2240s, ostensibly to show that there were “centres of prosperity, culture and honour”: it had essentially been done so that the state could ‘free’ all the Savan workers on the homeworld and just wash their hands of any obligation to them.
[40] It is worth noting at this point that the first Klingon railway, the Imperial Transfer, was constructed and managed by skilled Savan Labour alongside wage work.
[41] This practice – of renting Savan Labour to the state – was uncommon but would form the core of how Sturka would manipulate the practice across the 2260s.
[42] The Ba’Clar duchies had been formed in the early 22nd century by a fringe collection of minor houses who, along with many of their people, had decamped from within the Empire to avoid repression (and, more importantly, tax collection). Their fragile government would collapse in 2260, and most of their territory would be annexed by the Romulan Empire.
[43] The democratic experiments were (and are) obsessed over by Federation Political Scientists. They were, however, uncommon, and only occupied in two cases. None involved total universal suffrage, or a completely independent legislature.
[44] The exact origin of the Raktajino is relatively unknown. The hagiography points to a skirmish between a group of Human and Klingon settlers on the planet Re’Vac (Thornton’s World) in the mid-2220s. Whlle negotiating a truce, both leaders offered each other drinks; human cappuccino and Klingon spice wine. The Human negotiator, later into the negotiations, accidentally poured spice wine into the Klingon’s cup; the resulting concoction was, however, appetising to both parties. While this story is rather neat (and heart-warming for peace activists), it is more likely that the drink emerged in the 2230s through cultural exchange between the independent settlements in the borderlands. Klingons have, themselves, been drinking coffee since the mid-2160s, where it gained the native name qa’vIn.
[45] The Toran Savan-ak was the largest front, but it was spread out across much empire deep in the Beta quadrant. Little is really known about them.
[46] The Quch’Ha – “unclean” – are those Klingon who lack forehead ridges due to the Augment virus of the mid 2150s. For much of the 2260s, they formed a central part of the military – both due to their ostracization, and eventual loyalty to the Sturka government that would emancipate them.
“Oh, we’re building battleships now, are we? I didn’t know we’d made Jackie Fisher Commander, Starfleet.” – Peter Broadhurst, upon reading the first draft of the Starfleet Allocations Bill.
The Undeclared War
Peter Toussaint would return to Starbase 19 in March 2260; this time, not as a member of its staff, but as an attendee (and observer) at the largest regional command conference since the Klingon War. While Rittenhouse had made his mark on Klingon Command, Toussaint had settled into his new position at Starfleet Operations, as a semi-official liaison between Nogura and the new “Strategic Planning and Defensive Measures Division”.[1] Better known as “The War Office” due to its location near Old Britain’s War Office in London, it had been established by Ch’Shukar to prepare clearly operational plans in the aftermath of the Klingon War and had quickly found itself in Nogura’s orbit.
Toussaint was surprised by how pliant Ch’Shukar was to the Grand Old Man’s meddling, but soon learned that Commander, Starfleet was perfectly happy to use Nogura’s compulsion for planning for his own means. “Uncle Shu had far too much on his plate anyway,” Toussaint recollected. “He’d been hauled over the coals over the poor response to Gorn raiding, and even though he could handle that, he delegated a great deal to Nogura that winter.”[2] Ch’Shukar’s office had borne the brunt of the political ramifications of Caleb IV, including the Councilor Tilly’s rapidly organised and conducted Inquiry.
Ch’Shukar’s circling of the wagons against civilian scrutiny was reflected in fleet dispositions across winter 2259 as well. The destruction of the 2nd Fleet at Caleb IV meant that difficult decisions had to be made to protect internal lines of communication. Triangle Command and Federation Border Patrol had survived the crisis relatively intact, but neither had the quality or quantity of ships necessary to fill the void left by Caleb IV. They could maintain their patrols in their sectors, but no more.[3] 4th Fleet wasn’t in much of a better state – it covered over a 1/3rd more space than 2nd Fleet, from Sauria down to the Taurus reach and the edge of Tholian space. Even with the 7th Fleet stepping up to cover the borders of the Taurus reach and the Eminiar gap, 4th Fleet was still overstretched, especially after the Eaves-Beyer vessels were withdrawn in December.[4] While initially Starfleet Operations had been in favour of a retire-and-refit programme, the loss of Yard 39 meant that there were no spare parts for such a procedure.[5] Caleb IV was the final nail in the coffin for the Eaves-Beyer era. They were too slow, sluggish to turn, and consumed antimatter at alarming rates, and this was all on top of poor tactical performance. They had formed the backbone of the fleet for nearly 20 years, but they were simply unfit for the modern demands of the fleet. Their day was over.
With the total strength of Klingon Command down by a half, withdrawal was a necessity. Pulling back from the Eminiar gap was an acceptable loss that could be covered by the 7th Fleet, but 4th fleet simply could not cover the long border region spin ward of Orion and fill the gap left by 2nd Fleet.[6] In January, Rittenhouse made the decision to pull 2nd Fleet out of the Archanis sector, despite opposition from the Colonial Committee and the President himself. There wasn’t any other choice; Archanis, despite its strong links to the federation core along the “Archer highway” was the closest region of treaty space to the Klingon capital, constantly contested by the Imperial Navy and noble fleets. [7] The site of major fighting in both the Klingon war, it had always required heavy patrolling by larger ships – most of which were lacking after the losses before and during Caleb IV. Initially Rittenhouse had requested a large transfer of vessels from the 1st fleet and 5th Fleets, including two Constitution Class ships and all four of the new Ranger class cruisers, but Shukar had rejected it out of hand. [8] The Ranger was still not ready, and Admiral April was unwilling to surrender even a single Constitution from his exploration force.[9] Archanis would have to be ceded, at least in a de jure sense; the maps would stay the same, even if the facts didn’t.
The Colonial Committee was furious when the withdrawal was announced. While Starfleet would maintain convoy escorts across the sector, the general anti-piracy (and anti-Klingon) patrols would end on March 1st. It left nearly 4000 prospectors and independent miners, as well as the dozen or so colonies and civilian outposts in the region out on a limb, without any promise of return. The President saw it as a betrayal of his own promises to protect the frontier regions, even though he admitted that Archanis had always been a system too far. Most in Klingon Command were resigned to the move after Caleb IV, but were deeply infuriated by Rittenhouse’s’ near-gleeful memorandum highlighting how the drawdown would allow 2nd Fleet to “straighten its front” and “build up a necessary and vital reserve”.[10] Rittenhouse also made no fans in Paris by failing to defend his actions in person, instead sending a similarity toneless memorandum to the Council promising that “the frontier colonies will become safer” thanks to “a commitment to protecting defendable assets”.[11]
Withdrawal from Archanis had been a difficult decision. It made strategic sense - it was the closest region to the Klingon heartland, and the most hotly contested, but it was also a long way from the Federation core. Trade routes and supply lines into the sector also ran dangerously close to the Alshanai rift and Orion Neutrality Area. With the losses at Caleb IV compounded by the Yard 39 disaster, Klingon Command could no longer guarantee proper escorts in those regions. Archer and Burke class scouts were performing the escort duties of destroyers, while Detroyat and Pioneer class ships were having to confront larger raiding forces and Klingon cruisers in lieu of Class I Starships, were remained few and far between.[12]
The only saving grace was the rapid activation of several Hermes and Saladin Class ships, which had been held in mothball for much of the 2250s over issues from their single-nacelle design. The single nacelle design, initially seen as a brilliant cost-cutting scheme, had led to major issues with warp and impulse turning, that had seen the two classes withdrawn from frontier service soon after commissioning. However, advances in impulse steering technology from the Marrone team at Axanar Yards allowed for some correction. Drake had opposed releasing them, only allowing three to take part in Caleb IV, but all had performed well there. While their single nacelle arrangement still had difficulties in turning, they accelerated quickly and were a very stable platform for the new Mark VII Phaser bank. Of the 42 vessels that remained on the Starfleet roster, all but 6 were reactivated for service by Nogura, on Rittenhouse’s urging. 28 of them would end up in Klingon Command, either as part of the Border Patrol or 2nd Fleet. Amongst the activated ships was the USS Sacajawea, the Hermes-Class Scout that would serve as James T. Kirk’s first command. Time would prove them worthy adversaries for the Klingon Bird of Prey and destroyers, especially D2 and the yet-to-come D18.[13]
The activation of these light ships was a boon to Klingon Command, but their deployment remained up for debate. So far, the ad-hoc Mendez columns were serving their purpose, but the continued lack of capital ships was telling. Rittenhouse had long talked of restructuring the organization of regional fleet commands in his writings, and it was clear to everyone that he was going to take his chance now to put his plans into action. The Command Conference on Starbase 19 was the culmination point of that planning and was attended by everyone who was anyone in the Klingon region, including almost all the Starbase commanders, all the Admiralty staff, and several senior captains including Robert Wesley, Robert Stone (who had recently taken over as CO of the USS Cairo, a new Kirov Class Starship), Ron Tracey and Angela Fukuhara.
Toussaint was surprised by the cautious mood. “People weren’t exactly queueing up to get Rittenhouse’s signature, but they also weren’t exactly cussing him out at the bar, either.” Most people didn’t know what to expect of Rittenhouse beyond a big idea. A lot of the senior staff were willing to give him the opportunity to try a big idea at the very least. “Drake was a confident field commander, and a dedicated explorer, but she wasn’t a grand plan person.” Her limited schemes like the Burke Class, or the endorsement of the Mendez Columns, had been relatively successful, but she had never confronted the fact that Klingon Command was not organised properly for its status as an “overt defensive formation”, to quote a memorandum from Nogura to Rittenhouse in early 2260.
While there had been some preliminary talks and conferences, most notably between representatives of the Merchant navy and Starfleet over new convoy tactics and liaison systems, the main event was the Joint staff conference on the 21st. It was billed as a discussion, but everyone – especially Rittenhouse himself – understood it clearly as a chance for the new boss to tell everyone what exactly his vision was. Toussaint was sceptical, sharing Nogura’s dim view of a plan that remained so secret that the final versions hadn’t even been shared with Starfleet Operations. Rittenhouse liked the suspense of it all, apparently, much to the irritation of the “Grand Old Man” and much of his own staff. Toussaint, however, watched with muted interest as Rittenhouse began by highlighting successes made in exploratory and colonial support missions. “He referred to it as “good training”, whatever that meant. He also brushed quickly over the more tedious explanations for the withdrawal from Archanis, before moving onto why he felt that was necessary. A total re-organisation and formalisation of Klingon Command, on a military model. I understood now why Uncle Shu had picked him.”
What Rittenhouse proposed was a complete restructuring of the Tactical Fleet within a new framework: Operational Squadron Organisation (OSO). The Shran doctrine – based on independent patrolling– was to be abandoned, replaced instead by a network of rigid sector blocs, with clear jurisdictions based around Starbases, key planets and other major support facilities. The ad hoc Battlegroups and Escort Groups were abolished in favour of permanent formations. Each of the two main fleets (2nd and 4th) would be split into Squadrons of three types: Starship Squadrons (STARRON), Cruiser Squadrons (CRURON), and Destroyer Squadrons (DESRON), which would form organizational, operational, and logistical apparatus.[14] The Cruiser and Destroyer Squadrons would each be led by a senior Fleet Captain or Commodore, while each Starship Squadron would be commanded by a Rear Admiral. Despite the rigidity of this table of organization, they were not permanent field formations. Instead, each grouping would be assigned an area of operation (a sector grouping for each DESRON and CRURON, or a whole fleet operating area for the STARRON). This meant that ships, and their commanders, would build up long term experience working alongside each other in familiar parts of space. One of the key issues both before and during the last war with the Klingons had been Captain’s unfamiliarity with both the territory and the ships they were fighting alongside. Permanent areas of operation would not only solve that easier but allow for clearly delineated areas of responsibility for the supply, convoy duty and other tasks. It meant an end to the overlapped jurisdictions that had confounded planners from the 2240s onwards and cost many a life during the Klingon War. These designations would also allow Transport Command and Starfleet Logistics to begin putting together coherent resupply plans with specific tenders and support craft for each DESRON and CRURON.[15]
The new plan would involve a massive shift in the fleet strengths away from the Starship and Cruiser heavy formations of the 2240s and 50s towards a lighter balance of tonnage. 2nd and 4th Fleets would each consist of two STARRON and CRUON, and five DESRON. Overall, this would be a 20% reduction in cruiser strength and a 50% increase in total Destroyer, Corvette, and Escort strength. To the casual observers’ eye, it seemed odd that after a massive defeat at the hand of Klingon capital ships at Caleb IV, Starfleet was going to reduce their number. However, what Rittenhouse (and his staff) concluded, both from Caleb IV and from analysing other actions in the disputed area, was that the weakness did not lie with the Starships and Cruisers. The “big three” Heavy Cruisers of the 40s and 50s – Constitution, Europa, and Pyotr Veliky – had all held their own against the D7 and had been more than a match for the D6A and D4. Even though the Europa was being retired, it’s replacements – the “pocket Connie” Kirov and Ranger – were even better armed and had an even longer range of operations. Even concerns about the possibility of Klingon “Battleships” – at this point no more than rumours – were not enough to push for any sort of “Dreadnought Race”. Starfleet had always built its first-rate line out of long-range heavy cruisers, and with the ascendancy of the Starship Principle, it was unlikely that there would be any change there.[16] While Rittenhouse had a place for warships in his vision (and would play an important personal role in ensuring that new Battleship designs were included in the allocations bill), they were not as this stage a priority. The gap lay in the frigate-destroyer roster, which had often been filled by older Starships that were relegated to second line duties without much of a refit, or to ships that had been designed as long-range cruisers but had then been stripped down to serve as lighter vessels.
Rittenhouse’s new Klingon Command had no use for them at present. Instead, he wanted to base the new DESRON’s around purpose-built destroyers. A fair few did exist, notably the Larson and Detroyat Class vessels, but their production runs had been small, limited by civilian committees that remained hesitant to authorise such overtly “military” ships. This had been an unfair assessment – the Detroyat’s Captains, for their part, racked up a dazzling array of scientific discoveries in the Kzin and Ru’Shara sectors – but they were overshadowed by the reputation the vessel had as a “Kzinti killer”. These lighter craft were necessary to counter the bulk of Imperial fleet strength – the Birds of Prey and their larger I-2 and D-5 cousins. The DESRONs would act as the defence against raiding, aggressive patrolling, and piracy, while the CRUSON and STARRONS would provide the heavy support in case of a major incursion by the main Klingon fleet.[17] This would also (theoretically) free up the Cruisers and Starships for their main duties – exploration, scientific survey, and flag-flying.
These operational changes were drastic, but somewhat complementary to the changes that had been in the air since the appointment of Admiral Ch’Shukar as Commander, Starfleet. Since he had taken up the post at the end of 2258, Uncle Shu had been fighting an attractional battle with the various civilian oversight departments to get his new fleet reforms past. Much of the plan that had been detailed during the fated session in summer 2258 had formed the core of the 2259 Starfleet Allocations Bill, which pushed for a major expansion of Destroyer and medium Cruiser production, alongside an increase in recruitment quotas and a further allocation sub-bill for Starbase reconstruction and expansion. It was a hefty piece of legislation – Starfleet Allocations bills always were – and as always, there was a massive fight over every expense that saw the bill bounce for almost a year between the Council chambers, the executive and oversight committees that had the final say on any resource and budgeting needs.
Starfleet’s massive purview, constantly expanding since its founding in 2161, had left it with several overlapping overview committees and allocations boards, often at cross purposes. Even after the 2245 Cabinet reforms, there were still four different offices and councils that could each veto or halt any major changes to operations. Within the Cabinet, the C-in-C and Chief of Staff were directly accountable to the Starfleet Secretary and the Defence Commissioner, whose interests often clashed massively, especially under the incumbent Commissioner, Jhotha Zh'zhenoth, who was a strong proponent of involving planetary forces directly in Starfleet operations.[18] The Starfleet Secretariat, in comparison, was still in a pre- 2256 headspace, more focused on explorative assets and long-term projects than immediate needs.
On the legislative side, the C-in-C and Commander, Starfleet (in place of the Chief of Staff) were overseen by the Federation Security Council and the Starfleet Oversight Committee.[19] The Security Council, in its pre-2276 arrangement, has widely been considered a bit of a sham organisation, beholden to the permanent member seats of Earth, Andor, Vulcan and Tellar Prime and giving them far greater power than should have been allowed. This did not mean that it was a council of self-interested actors. The 2259 Starfleet Allocations bill had only survived that years’ session and been carried on to 2260 thanks to the intervention of the Terran, Tellarite and Martian councillors.
The real opposition came from the Starfleet Oversight Committee (SOC). While the SOC had been a strong supporting group of Starfleet during the Archer Presidency and the early 2200s, since the great awakening it had rapidly evolved into a restraining force, dominated by the Vulcan and Tellarite Caucuses. Opposed to mass expenditure and Starfleet “Imperialism”, their general opposition to expansion had waxed and waned with the political forces, reaching a low point during the 2240s (when they agreed to the Constitution, Pyotr Veliky and Atlas Class) before becoming more resistant again in the 2250s. They had been the main blocking point for Ch’Shukar’s reform plan until the start of 2260, when 1/3rd of its members were cycled out. In a shock to everyone (except those who’d been paying attention to the council in 2259), all 4 members failed to be renominated, and were replaced by the councillors for New Paris, Benicia, Inverness and Regulus – all members of the OSFP (Outer Systems and Frontier Party). This meant that (de jure at least) there was now a majority on the Oversight Committee for the Allocations bill.
This didn’t necessarily mean that it was plain sailing through to assent. As always, every piece of expenditure had to be questioned and compared to the (imagined) idea of what Starfleet’s goal was. The key cause of contention in February and March 2260 was Starfleet Command’s decision to cancel Project Yorktown and delay the finishing of Earth Spacedock.[20] These two programmes had been highly popular with the voters, but were also massively over budget and a drain on resources; for the resource and manpower cost of Starbase Yorktown, Shukar’s team estimated they could build an extra 10 Saladin’s and 15 Kearsage Class ships on top of a replacement Watchtower class station.[21] The Council, while approving of the cut, was concerned by the focus on the military duties of the fleet. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t approve well-armed ships; more that if Starfleet wanted them, they would have to cheat a little.
A good example of this was the Larson Class, which had been approved by the Council as a “support exploratory craft” thanks to the initial design’s large cargo decks, efficient antimatter usage and extensive ventral sensors. After approval, the Larson had some “complications”, that led to the replacement of several cargo bays with large fusion cores, along with the installation of large phaser banks. The Council, having already approved the funding, had no issue re-approving the Larson, and even supported its sister design, the two-naccelled Derf Class surveyor-tender. While this trick had worked with the Yorktown funding, Rittenhouse well understood that there was no way he’d be able to convince them to back the significant upgrade to the destroyer fleet he wanted overnight. The Squadron reorganisation itself was also an easy sell, especially once Rittenhouse explained that each unit would have its own astrographical area of operations. Eliminating the blind spots like the Eminiar gap and the Regulus channel had been a long-term demand of the merchant navy, and a large deployment of escorts was exactly what they wanted.
“It was a good scheme, irritatingly,” Toussaint wrote. “It was a long term one, though, based on husbanding what we had in case the Klingons made a move.” The destroyer primacy would have been rejected by council even two years earlier, but now, the move to build many ships rapidly would immediately see active support from the colonial committee and the emergent Outer Systems Freedom Party.[22] With additional pressure from the merchant navy and cargo haulers’ unions (whose enthusiasm for a larger destroyer roster was noted even by Toussaint), Rittenhouse’s little ships were a safe and easy way to match the large number of raiding vessels that had done most of the damage before, during and after the 2256-57 war.
There were other important discussions at the conference. The primacy of Commodores and other Starbase Commanders was clarified. The position of Starfleet vessels on independent three- and five-year missions in relation to static commands was codified, despite a massive sparring match between Captains Stone, Chandran and Beck. Very few concrete decisions were made, outside of the fleet reorganisation and the destroyer plan – not for lack of wanting, though. “Rittenhouse did talk a lot of big ideas, especially around building more Watchtower bases, monitoring outposts and some crazy minefield scheme,” Toussaint recollected. “But he held back on that, though. He was playing it safe, lest the Klingons get the jump on us. We expected a major Klingon play in the Archanis or Kobax regions any day now. The weird thing was nothing happened. Not in the month after the conference, and not for most of 2260. The Klingons were, apparently, busy.”
He was right - while Klingon warships had pushed forward into the Triangle in the 3 months after Caleb IV, the withdrawal of the 2nd and 4th fleets towards Krios, Tellun and Ardana had not been matched with an advance. There was a mild increase in privateering and raiding, but for the most part the Imperial Navy kept its distance, choosing to focus on securing local planets for the Empire instead of harrying Starfleet back to the other side of the disputed area. This was bad enough for the UFP - the securing of Krios, Valt, Keto Enol and a dozen other “fringe” worlds for the Empire cut off several vital ports from Federation Trade. Imperial Governors had soon followed across the autumn and winter, securing the power structures and institutions of these conquered planets for the Empire. The distant danger of the Imperial navy was replaced by the round-the-clock terror of the Klingon Army and Imperial Marine Corps, who backed new decrees, taxes and laws with their disruptors and general brutality. The Army – formed almost entirely from conscripts and auxiliary draftees – was well known for its indiscipline on occupation duty, treating both conquered subjects and civilian Klingons with equal disdain and brutality.[23]
The possibility of a major Klingon putsch in the disputed area was beginning to affect the President’s reformist agenda. The Colonial Reform Bill had been a core part of his electoral campaign, building on the lack of council representation for the colonies of member worlds.[24] As the colonies grew and communication times shortened, the central governments of the core worlds began to exert more control over their colonies, either through interfering legislation or, in the case of certain members, not governing them all, depriving them of even ineffective policymaking. The fact that the core worlds opposed “Commodore Law-making” – the practice of treating local Starbase commanders as universal regional justices in lieu of any frontier legal institutions – without providing any contingent replacement underlines how deeply disinterested most of them were in making the colonial regions “fit” into the Federation system.[25]
Even discussions around defence underlined the stratified political status of colonial regions. Rittenhouse’s decision to withdraw from the Archanis sector had been backed (against the wishes of the President) by the Security Council, who could do so without factoring in the effects the withdrawal would have on either local member worlds, or their own colonies. The fact was that the Federation Charter hadn’t been designed to have members like Sauria, Kobax or R’ongovia, who butted right up against the borders of a hostile power. It certainly wasn’t designed to have individual members as the only representatives on hundreds of colonies of all sizes, spread across the quadrant. Even the colonial committee was nothing more than a patch over the hole, a rush job created by the Qasr administration in the aftermath of the Tarsus IV disaster.
President Th’rhahlat’s entire political life had been centred on redressing this balance. He’d even helped form a party – the OSFP – around the principle of equal representation for colonies in the council. His Colonial Reform Bill –, wide-ranging, comprehensive, and radical – would overhaul council representation completely, granting significant powers of veto and scrutiny to the colonial committee while upgrading the largest colonies to full membership of the Federation without the need for the gruelling accession process. It was the largest constitution change to the charter since the office of President had been created, and it met just as much opposition. None of the big four – especially Tellar and Earth – wanted anything to do with it, although for different reasons. For Tellar Prime, the reason was simple: Tellar Rule meant Tellar rules – in the sense that, Tellar Prime law (and tariff law) would continue to apply in the colonies. The Tellarite government (which never really bought in to the whole ‘new world economy’ concept) happily extracted import tariffs from many of its colony worlds, while also allowing various Federation and non-Federation businesses to use them as entrepots between the UFP and neutral powers, much to the chagrin of the locals. The big Tellarite corporations were despised by most of the colonies, and while their local councils and courts repeatedly evicted them, the home government’s refusal to ban them entirely had been a bone of contention between the colonists and their leaders for decades.[26]
Earth’s concerns were far more paternal; after Tarsus IV, the United Earth government had invested a great deal of time and effort into building a safety net for its colonists and invested immense economic and political capital in supporting many of the larger colonies. Good intentions aside, it was not a popular move within the colonies themselves, many of which had already established their own identities (and political systems) before the UE government came back to meddle. Earth was more concerned about social stability and self-sustainment – something the colonies could handle themselves – than the problem they were concerned with, the Klingons. Earth colonies had always pushed the frontier the furthest and quickest and had suffered most from Klingon raiding during both the recent wars. They needed unity; but they didn’t want closeness with earth. They wanted regional unity – the ability to coordinate defence plans between their neighbours and local Starfleet commanders.
The fact that all these concerns were going through the government on Earth was a nauseating reminder that they were not, in fact, autonomous. True autonomy – the sort of regional representation that Th’rhahlat aspired towards – would mean serious and codified reforms to the Federation Charter, which the Earth Government of the day was not going to accept. There was going to be no easy passage for the bill. Even the proposition of a Babel Conference as a method to force the issue was fraught with danger.[27] The Federation was too weak to have the bill fall apart on such a public stage. If it was going to pass, it wasn’t going to happen in the swift, brutal crucible of Babel. It would have to be pushed through the council.
As such, early 2260 was an inflection point in several ways. For Starfleet, and especially Klingon Command, it marked the end of the “Shran Doctrine” as the dominant operation plan. The implementation of “Operational Squadron Organisation (OSO)” – better known as the “Rittenhouse Doctrine” - would take time, and be opposed by many within the Admiralty, but it was already changing how the fleet worked on the Klingon Border. For the reformers in the OSFP, change was much less rapid. Obstinacy from the core worlds – along with the gruelling and time-consuming process of this year’s Starfleet Allocations Bill – seemed ready to shut the reform bill out before it had even been tabled. The OSFP’s frustration was palpable after the Xaall filibuster, when the president’s once ally held up the Allocations Bill with a seven-hour diatribe about individual liberty, economic pacificism and the need for prospering spices in a Morquah sauce. The bill, long desired by everyone, would have to wait for the autumn session. Disgruntlement festered into frustration as many within and without of the OSFP wondered if the President was serious about Constitutional reform. He was – his own diaries and the minutes of Cabinet meetings make this abundantly clear – but the Constitution increasingly slid down the agenda, pushed out by the increasingly hegemonic Starfleet Allocations Bills, as well as managing the rippling economic aftershocks of T’Kuvma’s War. Keeping the ship of state afloat was a far more important priority than council reform, even to the arch-reformist himself.
Th’rhahlat remained confident, however, that the “shock therapy” of Caleb IV would not swallow his agenda entirely. “It’ll be a winter bill,” he told Peter Broadhurst, High Commissioner for Diplomatic Affairs. “I like a good winter. It’s the only time Earth feels like home.” The Reform Bill went back to the working committee, which continued to argue about the adjustments to representation and the voting systems, while the councillors who backed it began to idly wonder what exactly the point of having one of their own in the Palais de Concorde was.
Out on Orion, however, the Federation representatives had other more concerning issues than constitutional reform. On April 29th – the same day the debate on the Colonial Reform Act finally began in Paris – TK Rogers, the Federation ambassador to Orion, received a strange message from his Klingon counterpart. The Klingon Embassy on Orion had, in the five months since Caleb IV, rapidly evolved into the closest (if not most straightforward) point of contact between the UFP and the Empire. Communication was fraught, and often delivered through physical documentation under armed guard. Almost all the Klingon communiques and declarations had been delivered at the point of a dagger, the sharp point of a D’taktag driven into the steel doors at the front of the embassy compound. The note on the 29th did not come at the end of a knife, however, stabbed into the gates in the middle of the night. It came at 2pm in the afternoon, as Rogers finished his lunch, in the hands of a rather shaken looking Klingon – not an attaché, but the Ambassador himself, Kuvec.
Kuvec was a calculating brute of a man, chosen by L’Rell less due to his diplomatic skill than the knowledge that he was impossible to intimidate or sway, even with the advantages of Orion pheromones.[28] Roger’s previous interactions with him had all verged on violence in some form, to the extent that the chief minister of the Congress had stopped inviting them to the same formal dinners. This time, however, Kuvec entered the room slowly – almost gracefully, according to Rogers, who was even more surprised when the Klingon offered him a handshake as a greeting. “The hand was shaken, and we sat down. Unsure of what to do next, I offered him a glass of whisky. He looked like he needed it.” After a few moments of silence, Kuvec quietly asked Rogers if he’d heard from Mastocal recently. Rogers hadn’t.
“The ambassador asked me of a few other Klingon settlements along the border; Ganalda, Morska, Amar, Dorala. I hadn’t heard anything from then either. I asked Kuvec what exactly I should be hearing from them. He didn’t give me many details, beyond a cursory mention of a subspace relay fault. Eventually, he began to ask me about – of all things – coffee. I didn’t know Klingons drank it. According to Kuvec, true Klingons didn’t drink coffee. It was a terrible Earther drink, drunk only by traitors and revolutionaries, threats to both the Empire and the Federation. As he left, I stopped him, and asked him if they drank Raktajino on Mastocal. He stared at me for a long time, and then said. ‘I do not know what they drink on Mastocal. I have not heard from their governors for five weeks.’”
Kuvec’s information blackout was odd to Rogers, and when things were odd to Rogers, they brought it to Robson and N’Garreiez. The two spies went snooping. There was no news from Mastocal; no traffic either, a concerning prospect for one of the region’s largest trade ports. Initially, the Orion embassy feared that Mastocal had been destroyed completely; a fear assuaged by the ironic knowledge that if the Klingons didn’t already know what was going on, they would have already blamed the Klingons. What was worse was the idea that the Klingons did know what was happening and didn’t want to tell anyone. Had Kuvec been trying to find out what the UFP knew? What were the Klingons hiding? Other official channels and unofficial sources in the border colonies had also gone silent, with messages either being intercepted and bounced back by the Imperial Navy, or simply never being answered.
It took until the beginning of June for the Botchok Whigs to finally turn up an answer, drawn like a stone from a Klingon bureaucrat with deep debts. The border colonies had not been lost to some mysterious disease or blown up by a dangerous new enemy. Something much more terrifying had happened. They had revolted against the Klingon Empire.
The War of the Pay Slip
The 16th of February 2260 was the end of the month on Mastocal. More importantly it was pay out day: the day when those who earned monetary wages within the Klingon Empire received what they were owed from their labour. Pay-out day traditionally came twice a year, marked by bank holidays meant to celebrate the fruits of the Klingon peoples’ struggle. They were always chaotic, as Savan farm labourers, soldiers, craftsmen, and industrial workers queued up for their wages before descending on the markets, cafes, taverns, and clubs of the planets’ settlements to spend their hard-earned darseks as quickly and violently as possible. Kastol’lac – the capital city of Mastocal – was always crammed on this day, as Klingons from over 200 miles away travelled to get their fees from their Lords’ agents, forming (dis)orderly queues outside various offices and dwellings. There was always some unrest – that was expected – but the simmering tensions on Mastocal this month seemed worse than they’d ever been. The recent harvests had been slim, while trade with local powers in the region remained suppressed even two years after the end of the war with the Earthers. There was an expectation of a wage freeze, or worse, something made even more gruelling by the increasing collapse of value in the darsek.[29]
What made it worse was that the local garrison had been picked clean by the Imperial Navy, its best warriors press-ganged onto warships to replace losses at First Caleb IV. The ranks had been filled with local conscripts, many of whom had been dragged from better paying work to stand guard over their friends and family as they tramped through the town to receive their pay. Poorly trained, and even worse led at this point, the local Militia Brigade had already been declared substandard by the local governor, but with Imperial regulars needed elsewhere (namely, in reconquering a break way colony near Turnstile), he was told to make do. The Garrison, beyond its core of 200 or so professional warriors, was now made up of country boys, targ herders and “itinerants”, none of whom had any training or interest in crowd control.[30] These 6000 odd “soldiers” – youths, infirm ex-soldiers and the previously exempted - were expected to maintain order over nearly 200,000 tired, starving, and drunk farmers. It was a powder keg.
It's unclear where the rioting began at first. Most sources site the Durak offices near the central market, which makes sense. The cause, however, is unarguable. Wages had been frozen, but so had the “bounty” that was usually paid out as reward for any overtime work. With the rising living costs, it was really a pay cut – and large one, not limited just to the farm labourers but to the industrial workers and clerks as well. On top of the ends to various tax breaks (especially those on food), it essentially meant that the average farmer and skilled labourer on Mastocal was earning half as much as their counterparts of Qo’noS. The outraged workers of Mastocal demanded what they were owed immediately. In their view, it was their right to demand higher wages. They were the backbone of the empire: without their struggles against pests, climate, and the soil itself, there would be no warriors, no Imperial Navy, no conquests. The officials tried to explain that it wasn’t their fault – the decrees for wage freezes were only to cover increasing taxation on the great houses – but that wasn’t cutting it with the crowds of furious farmers. It wasn’t their fault that the High Council couldn’t balance their books. They were Klingons – Savan Klingons, the squires and farmers of the Empire – and they were entitled to the fruits of their labour.
The Durak offices were torched first by the crowd, which quickly turned-on other buildings in that quarter of the city. House clerks were thrown out into the street and beaten, while the treasuries and documents of the great families were ransacked, with debt records being piled high into bonfires and burned alongside legal contracts. The militia was unable to contain the rioters as they spread across the central district, with many soldiers joining their siblings and parents in the crowd. Some held firm, trying to hold the farmers back with stun bolts and sonic cannons. It was only a matter of time before someone panicked. It is likely that Aristocratic officers foreign to the planet, panicked by the size of the crowd and unsympathetic to their demands, ordered it to be dispersed quickly. Disruptor fire rung out across the main square, killed two or three dozen people in seconds.
Once the first kill shots were fired, the remaining militia were overwhelmed by the vengeful mob, who drove them back in the direction of the Governor’s palace. By this point, the workers were demanding more than just their fair share – they wanted the return of their old feudal rights; an end to Suliban slave labour on the planet; an end to the conscription of their sons and daughters, and most importantly, the Governor’s head on a spike. Governor Poroth, a later middle-aged soldier, was an excellent strategist but a terrible bureaucrat, and his rule over the merchant planet had been marred by constant corruption and vice, compounded by an almost evangelical quest to cut spending. The end of 2259 was the tipping point, as Imperial demands for an expanded Starbase and larger military facilities were covered by a complete cut in feudal poor relief, which left thousands on the planet below the “poverty line”.[31]
Deciding discretion to be the noblest form of honour, the governor had already departed the palace for the local spaceport, leaving the planet in the hands of his chief constable, a hard-nosed member of the House Duras, who had already decided the solution was to turn the garrison’s heavy cannons on the city. He would not live to see this massacre, however; a local boy, conscripted off a farm in the hills overlooking Kastol’lac, heaved him off a balcony late at night as he watched the burning city. The remaining militia garrison surrendered soon afterwards. As the farmers – led by the “Mastocal Restorative Council” took control of the Governor’s residence, they could see smoke rising from other sites on the horizon. Within a day of the first riots, almost every major plantation, foundry, and Imperial facility on Mastocal’s main continent had been seized by workers, while the Governor and the military fell back to the orbit space station. With the navy unwilling and unable to turn its disruptors on the planet below, Poroth had little choice but to skulk on the command deck, awaiting further orders from the Imperial chancellery. He was on that deck when the authorities received the fateful six demands from the restorative council on the planet below, which read as follows:
WE the collected workers of the planet Mastocal, as represented by the Restorative Council of People’s Justice, demand the following of the corrupt, incompetent fool who calls himself the ‘Governor’ of this fair planet.
- The appointment of a “Savan council” as part of the planetary government.
- Complete authority of the Savan council over the municipal authorities of the planet.
- The right of the Savan council to set poor relief rates and organise relief programs.
- Wage increases to return to the old Kuvat scale, with Savan council authority over wage changes.
- The restoration of the rights of rebuke and redress.
- The end of conscription.
These demands represent our will to restore the honour and sanctity of this great Klingon Empire, as ordained by the actions and directives of our Chancellor, L’Rell of Houses Mo’Kai and T’Kuvma.
These six acts – whose public mention and publishing would be illegal until the rule of Chancellor Gorkon - represented one of the most revolutionary acts in Klingon history. Their transmission terrified the Governor and his compatriots in the Imperial Navy far more than the rioting. The concept of an oversight council formed from the people was dangerous enough but giving that council power of any kind – especially power over the Great Houses – smacked of something far more dangerous than a simple labor outage or bread riot. It sounded like democracy.
Governor Poroth tried his best to suppress the message, blocking all subspace communications from the planet, but it was too late. Within days, colonies across the sector were in flames, their authorities besieged in their compounds. By late March 2260, what had initially been cast off as commonplace frontier unrest had escalated. The Imperial Navy, buoyant off its victory at Caleb IV, rushed back from the border to confront mutinous garrison troops that refused to fire on their own people. Even on Qo’noS itself, martial law had to be declared in the industrial city of Krennla, as unruly workers demanded: “Work, Bread and Honour” from the increasingly worried High Council. The rebels, led by the mystical (and almost certainly fictional) General Dill, had total control over several planets, a dozen ships and more. More threateningly to the Chancellor, several Minor houses, tired of marginalisation by the central government, were openly aiding and abetting the rebel groups, arming them in a bid to increase their own power by weakening the great families through internal strife. This open disunity – the exact opposite of the United Empire that L’Rell was supposed to embody – could not be tolerated.
Any quick chance of cutting the rebellion off at its head was thwarted by the first battle of Mastocal, when an advanced group of D5s and D6-Ds was ambushed and destroyed by three rebel D6-As. Poroth and his staff were eventually captured when the Quch’Ha garrison aboard the space station rebelled. They were handed over to the rebels, never to be seen again. There would be no coup de main against the Savan Council of Kling, as the rebels now call themselves.[32] The pIpyaH war – better known as the Raktajino Revolution, after the banned human-Klingon drink consumed by many of the rebels – had begun.[33]
There are, essentially, three main questions to ask of the pIpyaH war. Firstly, why was a worker-nobility coalition attacking a populist government that supposedly acted for them? Secondly, how exactly did the rebellion spread so quickly in the first few months? Why did it end as quickly as it did, without anything like the historical imprint it probably deserved? The answer to all three questions is a healthy combination of corruption, propaganda and iconoclasm: and, in true Klingon form, a healthy dose of culturally acceptable violence.
It is too easy to blame the revolts on a desire for democracy. It fit with how the Federation views itself in relation to the Empire and its ruling ideology. The idea that even the Klingon people themselves oppose the autocratic totalitarian rule of the Great Houses appeals to our own sensibilities. For the Klingon Empire, especially during and after the Sturkan period, the idea that the revolts were caused by the impurity of democratic thought, spread through the empire by perverse Earther literature fit perfectly with the totalitarianism of the regime. It is, however, not true. The rights the Klingon farmers and workers demanded were not about participation, and their grievances were not related to their political disenfranchisement. Instead, it is vital to place the revolution as a revolt against the new, centralised “Imperial” by the main beneficiaries of the old, “Feudal” order. It was not a demand for a new and progressive political system, but a defence of an old and traditional socio-economic one.
The Klingon economy fundamentally cannot be described in Terran terms. John Gill referred to it as being “Late Feudal in nature, its growth stunted in the Earth equivalent of the late enclosure period.” He cites the continued use and growth of ‘Savan’ – or Familial Service – labour as proof that the complex process of transferring away from indentured labour to wage-reliant labour had not begun within the Empire. Like most Gill analyses, the deep neo-Whiggery passes over the development of a highly complex industrial economy where indentured labourers were often serving alongside wageworkers. The M’K’llen view – that the Klingon indenture labour system is a deliberate and artificial form of “overt wage slavery” designed to keep Klingon workers out of the industrial sector (and thus prevent the development of a large urban proletariat and bourgeois that could threaten the great houses) is built, rather obviously, on the retro-active neo-Marxism of the Tellar school. It is ignorant, for example, of the economic state of Praxis right up into the 2270s, where wage labour and itinerant labourers worked alongside convicts and slaves constantly, or the great guild of Qo’noS, Mor’Petc and Quvat, who were practicing forms of the division of labour and industrial capitalism before humans had even invented the steam engine.
Constant attempts to make the Klingon economy “make sense” have essentially made it increasingly harder to dissect. It cannot be undervalued how much the economy was about “the right work for the right people”. There were certain jobs that Klingons should and should not do, and certain economic systems that were “right” and others that were “wrong”. It was not that wage labour was non-existent, or that it only existed for the privileged: it was simply that it was available for those Klingons who perceived it as being morally acceptable to work those jobs – who could find a justifiable “struggle” within the capitalist system. The “moral-monetary economy”, as Sigmund Schmidt put it, was and is an ever-evolving institution, as certain methods of productivity, income and industrial practice become more (or less) morally viable over time, with said morality often related to who politically benefitted from a certain kind of industrial progress.
While records point to an “economic revolution” in the 18th-19th centuries on Qo’noS, the mass transferal of populations to urban centres simply did not happen as it did on Earth, Vulcan or many other worlds that followed the Hodgkin-Phipps timeline of civilisational development. Klingon Feudal managers never enclosed their land – possibly because of the cultural significance of the open landscape in Klingon society, but more likely because most Klingon staple crops like the grain Qu’Mog did not require crop rotation to become more productive, and livestock farming was generally just a regulated form of hunting, which required uncleared brushland instead of hedgerow grazing.[34] Instead, machinery and the division of labour was used within the Savan system to increase efficiency.[35]
There was an urban migratory movement, but the fact was that most industrial work was conducted by convict (and conquest) labour. As we have previously discussed, industrial work was “dirty” work, without the honour or glory of the homestead or the comradery of the field. Savan work was seen as clear, moral, and Klingon – it was idealised in the way that Old Earth imperialists would idolise the homestead or the country manor. Those who worked for wages, as clerks, managers or skilled industrial labourers were often dismissed as le'wI' – wage-slaves – a pejorative that was even used by the Great Houses to decry the petty Industrialists and mercantile class, even though many of those “wage slaves” were richer than them by a substantial amount.[36] Cottage industries did develop, and across the 19th and 20th centuries these did grow into large sectors of free wage labour, but even by the end of the 22nd century, the majority of Klingon workers were not “free” workers.[37]
This did not mean that they were “indentured”. The Savan system granted an immense amount of rights and duties to those under it that did not exist outside of the system; the right to appeal decisions to the Lord and their representatives; representation and bargaining through petty courts; holy days, birthdays and ascension days off from work; provisions bed and board from their lords; the most significant right, of course, being that Savan workers were not required to work out of their homes after dark.[38] They were expected to perform a myriad of tasks, often all year round, whether it was back-breaking work in the fields, clearing land for use, infrastructure repair and construction or even clearing bandits from the hinterland.
Significantly, though, their duties could also be performed through martial service, either voluntarily or (more commonly) through the dreaded yIvotlh SuvwI' – the press-gang. Despite its legacy as a remnant of an age of noble levies, the press-gang was never challenged, especially from below, as it would mean challenging the whole system of Savan labour. Even if industrial skilled work paid better – which, as far as records go, it did throughout almost the entirety of the 23rd century – it was still seen as petty and fundamentally “risky”. Savan was the closest thing to a Klingon welfare system before the Kesh regime, and exiting it meant subjecting yourself to the whims of the market, risking a life of destitution and poverty for the chances of great wealth and profit. Many took those chances, and the slums of the first city were a testament to those who failed, and a warning to those who stepped out of the safety of Savan.[39]
To the post-monetary, libertarian-minded of the Federation, Savan work sounds like one step above slavery – a system barely fit for a world of railways and steam power, let alone warp speed and interstellar empires.[40] Savan workers of the 22nd and 23rd centuries were not tied to the land as their peasant predecessors or equivalents in Terran serfdom were. Reforms in the mid-20th century as the Klingon Empire began its first serious warp-based colonisation programme tied their obligations to the Great Houses, allowing the transfer of worker bases to new colonies without causing problematic legal battles. It benefitted both parties; the Savan workers received plenty of incentives for signing up to colonial service, often with higher standards of living and easier work, while their lords and governors were able to create sustainable population bases at a very rapid rate.
The only problem was that these colonies tended to become autonomous very quickly – so quickly, that it was difficult for the Imperial government and the great houses to use their powers to push the creation of organic industrial bases. Savan workers and their managers might be happy with a small duranium facility or a small shipyard, but the sort of large-scale industry necessary for interstellar society was not something that the Savan system was designed for. Attempts were made – most notably on the Qu’Vat colony in the 2160s – to convert the Savan system into a more versatile system of wage labour, but they were notably unsuccessful. The rigid nature of Industrial life conflicted massively with the rights of the Savan workers, which made the constant and time-sensitive worked of mechanised factory labour almost impossible to run efficiently. In the end, administration was passed over to minor noble families, allowing the Great Houses to maintain a grip on their holdings. The minor families – best considered an equivalent of a “Sword Nobility” of soldier-farmers – were perfectly happy to be made custodians of the traditional core of the Empire, especially if it meant they could protect it from the vices of industrialisation.
With the government and nobility unwilling to do away with the system during the 22nd and early 23rd century, the use of convict and conquered slave labour for industry became the norm Empire-wide. Everyone was happy with this; the Great houses maintained political and social control over the Savan labourers; the industrialists made immense amounts of money with almost no overheads for labour costs; the wage labourers weren’t forced to compete with Savan work for the limited number of competitive industrial jobs, and the rights and duties of the Savan were protected.
By the 2250s, however, the cracks were beginning to show. The Savan system had never been a profitable one; stable, yes, but not profit-generating. With the collapse of the central government after Donatu v, the general decline of the internal Klingon market that had begun in the 2220s went into overdrive, and the main profit-making engines of the Empire – the foundries, cottage industries and mines – lost almost all their external business. Strapped for hard cash, the Great Houses began to push the Savan workers harder and harder, relying more on their rights as Lords and Governors to demand more work for less pay and privilege. YIvotlh SuvwI' numbers also increased, with the number of conscripts within House Fleets jumping from 30% to nearly 70% between 2245 and 2258, with the houses pocketing the bounties for “selling” further conscripts into the Imperial armed forces.[41]
It was a tenuous solution and one that didn’t solve the fact that Savan labour simply wasn’t paying for itself anymore. It simply was not a “growth economy” the way that Orion opportunism or even pseudo post-monetarism is. Even if there was to be no great “transferral” to wage work, it needed to recover its sustainability. Increasingly, the Great Houses (and even the Imperial Government) made deals with Savan petty courts to get increased hours and diversified job schemes, with Savan workers agreeing to become factory overseers and file clerks in exchange for more personal land grants and the nebulous promise of higher wages at a later day. It was a flimsy scheme, but it worked, as long as one didn’t demand massive economic changes, inject a massive amount of unfree labour into the system or push through reforms that took power away from the local governors who might provide said land grants and higher wages. It certainly didn’t work if you tried all three at once, even if the system was increasingly dysfunctional.
L’Rell’s whole governing ethos was based around improving the quality of life for the Klingon people, with external resources, income and manpower as a bedrock on which to build a better, more powerful Empire. That meant massively increasing productivity; increasing production of manufactured goods, consumer products, warships: an emphasis on mass, high tech industry over the traditional economic core of the Empire. This was not a new concept – one does not create an interstellar society without embracing the forces of modernisation – but the Klingon Empire had always placed a serious emphasis on sustaining the feudal system of political economy even amongst the stars. What L’Rell was asking was a complete sea change in the Klingon economic order, comparable with old Earth’s “Great Leap Forward” or the post-Surak “logic economy”. Consequences were unavoidable.
Creating this new order fell to Sturka, the “First Officer of State”, whose meteoric rise to power only seemed to speed up in the aftermath of the victory at Caleb IV. L’Rell, still skeptical of the loyalty of the great houses, trusted him alone with the overseeing the industrial realignment. It is safe to say that Sturka was not a man of much economic skill. As long as productivity increased, and the number of ships being launched remained steady, he was happy. His main goal was to make the Klingon Empire productive – both as a society, and as an economy, so that it could defend itself and its people properly. His new navy plans, while still embryonic outside of the organisational changes, was already beginning to lean on rapid ship production. While the D7 upgrades and production increases had already put significant strain on the Imperial Shipyards, further plans would require a massive shift upwards in overall production, from duranium to computer parts. Increasing the size of the economy without central control was possible, but not easy, and despite Sturka’s initial attempts to wrest the financial reins away from the great houses, the Chancellor’s pushback prevented the creation of a planned economy at this stage. Instead, the production and productivity quotas were simply increased, as did the pressure on the great houses – and their workers.
Sturka didn’t care about the Savan. He was happy to pore over hundreds of reports from foundries just to make sure his plans were being followed, but he didn’t care about their negative effects. The Suliban “annexation” had been a rather successful short-term solution to the question of unprofitability, turning stagnant mines and factories into profitable ones while allowing hundreds of others to become productive overnight. The knock-on effects were, however, somewhat less productive. Suliban labour was so cheap that it essentially destroyed the consistently high wages of the Klingon “industrial aristocracy”, who were easily replaced by unfree workers even in mid-tier management and clerking positions. Complaints to bosses and the government were flippantly dismissed, with most taking the view that demanding “the right to work in a factory” was a dishonourable action. They were told to seek honourable work, and so they did, entering the small labour market for wage labour outside of the urban centres. With much more skills and experience than their Savan competitors, they very quickly took many of the higher positions as clerks, managers and officials. The Savan they replaced had become comfortable in their higher jobs and weren’t happy about being replaced by petty le'wI' who had never tilled a field in their lives.
L’Rell was aware of these concerns, and of the rapidly stagnating pay of the Savan as wages were suppressed by unfree labour. Alleviatory funding – drawn straight from treasury taxation and customs income – was meant to alleviate the strain, but (much to the bureaucracy’s frustration) the Great Houses pocketed the money. The Imperial civil service was simply too small to keep tabs on their own funds at this point, and the unsupportive nobility had been pinched too hard by central government. They needed the money more than the people, in their view. So, wages continued to stagnate, as traditionally guaranteed work was passed on to cheaper, less legally protected slave workers. What happened on that tepid day on Mastocal was the inevitable end to nearly a century of economic stagnation, exacerbated by a deliberate attempt to force an industrial system on a feudal culture. As much as the riots were about pay, they were a crucial rebellion against the “new” Empire: against capital and Noble corruption; against the rule of the army and the civil service over traditional leaders; and against the factories and foundries that were destroying traditional livelihoods.
It is no real wonder then that the rebellion grew as quickly as subspace radio could spread the news. Li Huang Rochefort, the only Earth historian to conduct serious research into the Raktajino Revolution, compares its wildfire spread with that of the 1848 Liberal Revolutions. Like on old Earth, the news of one revolt – caused by shared resentments and desires – would cause uprisings wherever it was broadcast, bypassing those places that did not have quick communications and heading right for centres of power and authority. Control of subspace relays early on, even if only for a limited period, allowed the Mastocal Council to incite revolt right across the core ward border region, where Savan labourers were joined by underpaid craftsmen, deserting conscripts, QuchHa’ exiles and minor nobles to throw out both the Great Houses and the Imperial Government by force.
Much of the turmoil over land ownership and the rights due to Savan labourers was semi-common knowledge, even within the dubiously competent circles of Starfleet Intelligence. The closeness of Klingon colonies within certain parts of the disputed area (especially near the Azure Nebula and the Alshanai rift) meant that news of the Labour Riots and the spread of “General Dill” spread even quicker there, and even spread into independent Klingon settlements in the Triangle, beginning the final death throes of the kleptocratic Independent Duchies of the Ba’Clar.[42] By the end of March, Imperial governors and garrisons had been besieged, ejected or exiled from fifteen planets, including four regional capitals and two major trade hubs, not including Mastocal. Their new governments varied differently, from the loose council regime of Mastocal, to full-blown democratic experiments, to minor noble despotism. [43] It was Mastocal that made the Raktajino the supposed symbol of the revolution. The drink – a blend of human coffee and Klingon spices – was banned by the government in 2240 due to its “subversive cultural influences”.[44] Coffee plants, which thrived in the humid environments of most Klingon worlds as a semi-invasive species, were ripped up and destroyed as weeds. Liberation from the Great Houses and government meant an end to its suppression, and as the disparate rebel groups expanded across the length of the borderland and reached into the Imperial Core, the drink spread with it, its consumption spreading like a terrifying earther parasite through the Empire, with radical ideas and revolutionary plotters following in quick succession.
To us in the 24th century, it is difficult to contemplate a Klingon government that could not deliver a swift and brutal response to insurrection. We are grimly use to holotapes of Klingon attack craft making strafing runs of villages, while shock troops break down doors and haul civilians out of their homes. It was not that this level of savagery was unseen, but quite simply that the Klingon state of the 2250s simply did not have the capacity to contain revolt the way that we would expect they could. The Imperial Navy was not in a fit state to respond swiftly. Most of the 2257 and 2258 batch of Imperial conscripts had been lifted from the farming colonies of the Fringe themselves, often by vessels returning home after the 2257 Armistice. They had not been digested well, to say the least, often enduring the worst of bad leadership and brutal conditions as Sturka remade the Imperial navy from the inside out. There were several significant mutinies in the first six weeks of the revolution, where captains and officers were brutally murdered (in a dishonourable fashion) by crews unwilling to turn their ships’ weapons on the planets below them.
By the time the bulk of 2nd and 5th Fleet Groups began to respond, the rebel factions had established themselves. By mid-April there were three main groups – The Mastocal Council, The Toran Savan-ak, the Korvat Front and the Order of the D’kTag.[45] While the first three were closer to “people’s fronts” – formed from respected members of the labouring and skilled class alongside mutineering officers – the latter represented the lesser nobility, and much (if not all) of the economic and military strength of the revolutionaries. They were, however, but less concentrated; while the Mastocal and Korvat factions were geographically centralised, the noble rebels were spread out across the empire.
Their goals were also different. While it is increasingly clear from primary source work that the “people’s fronts” were interested in economic goals – specifically, an end to rapid industrialisation and protection for the Savan – the nobility (as they always tend to) had their own ambitions. They had no real problem with the collapse of Savan rights, or mass conscription, or even the destruction of tradition by industrialisation. It was very simply that the winners were the Great Houses, not them. Their revolts against the government had been much more calculated, targeting dilithium mines, arsenals and shipyards instead of population centres. Their control of vital relay stations – seized mainly through bribery than by force – was critical in allowing the rebellion to spread, as were other “economic methods” used to persuade ship captains not to intercede. By the time the rebels finally convened on Mastocal to figure out what exactly their aims were, the nobility had the strongest negotiating position of all the factions. Even the military rebels – who had immense support amongst the Quch’Ha “unclean” demographic – could bring little to the table beyond manpower and simmering resentment against aristocrats who still shunned then for their genetic defects.[46]
There not that many details about the Mastocal conference. The “people’s councils” went in with the most radical demands, including the abolition of slavery, massive land grants, and the right to “honourable work”. The nobility were the most reactionary, demanding little more than a united front to overthrow the High Council and replace it with “more honourable leadership” (themselves). For the military faction, emancipation was the vital key; something that neither the people’s rebels or the nobles could really accept. Bringing the Quch’Ha into the fold would mean embracing an infection on Klingon society. They were radical in their own ways, intent of upsetting, overthrowing, and remaking the political establishment of the Klingon Empire in their own ways, but they were still restrained by the inevitable bigotry of the Imperial system.
The negotiations at the end of May came to nothing. Even as the rebels made further gains in the Kantari sector, and rolled by the Home Fleet towards Qo’noS, it was clear that there would be no united front against L’Rell’s leadership. If a couple of the Great Houses had broken ranks, they may have been able to corral the disparate groups behind a single cause, but the rebels were too different for that. Their visions of the Empire were far too disparate; too at odds with one another. They would co-operate tactically, especially during the final stages of the counter-revolution, but that would be all.
Did the Raktajino revolution ever have much chance of success? This is a rather difficult question to answer. The combination of the Savan and minor nobility shattered the ability of the Great Houses to respond properly, and the aristocracy’s own opposition to the central government had crippled their ability to respond before the crisis even began. If coherent leadership of some kind had emerged – a revolutionary vanguard, to use archaic historical language – then there was a possibility that the Savan-noble-Quch’Ha forces could have cohered properly. But the nature of the three groups prevented such a possibility. When the Great Houses had attempted to overthrow the chancellor before, they had done so with aims, ambitions and strategy aimed at regime change. The Savan Councils were not interested in regime change – they wanted an end to the total rule of the Great Houses, an end to the economic revolution of the last ten years and return, really to the archaic pastoral ideal of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Quch’Ha simply wanted to escape a life of martial servitude and second-class citizenship. The minor nobility, even though there were largely united in their opposition to the central government, were only really interested in replacing the 24 families on the High Council with themselves. There were people who did have plans to reshape the Empire coherently though. They were not amongst the rebels. The same military bureaucrats who had reshaped the Imperial Navy from microscopic retinue to professional military regarded the rebels and the Great Houses with equal disgust and disdain. Despite L’Rell’s best efforts, the Empire remained paralysed by cowardly aristocrats. They had to be cowed to save the People of Kahless from destroying themselves, and that had to happen now; before it was too late.
[1] Located in Admiralty Arch, London.
[2] Gorn raiding – while unidentified for most of the 2240s and 50s – was a long-term concern of South-Western Command. 2259 saw an increase in deep strikes, including an attack on the Finnibus III colony that killed over 800 people and crippled the USS Enterprise. The demands for better defences saw the transfer of four Kirov-Class ships to South-Western Command, along with 5 Larson and 10 Burke class ships. Klingon Command would feel their loss, especially in early 2261 once the “Channel Battles” began. Over 15,000 civilians would become casualties or go missing between 2240 and 2272. 6,472 Starfleet and UFP Marine personnel would lose their lives defending the colonies before Treaty of Cestus III established a mutually recognised border.
[3] Triangle Command and the FBP were aided by the accession of the R’hongovian Protectorate to associate status, which allowed them to use treaty ports within the lower half of the Triangle from 2261 onwards. While R’hongovia itself has become a federation member, most of its space became the frontline between the Romulans and Klingons during the “Villam War” of 2273-80.
[4] The “Eminiar Gap” is the colloquial name for FGC-321 Star cluster, part of the area of space between Starbase 22 and Medusa. While the region forms an important part of the Capella trading route, there were no treaty ports or federation outposts in the region until the end of the Eminiar-Vendikar War in 2267.
[5] Yard 39 was a Starfleet installation in the Tellar Section, which had been selected as the main mothball and retrofit yard for Eaves-Beyer type ships. However, in December 2259, a local supernova flooded the system with Baryon Radiation, rendering it uninhabitable. Over 100 vessels were left in the yard.
[6] 7th Fleet would be split in two in January 2260, with the 7th covering the Taurus Reach, Eminiar Gap and New Milan sector while the new 14th Fleet took over patrols and exploration along the majority of the Tholian border.
[7] The “Archer Highway” was the nickname for the three subspace corridors that allowed Jonathan Archer to travel from Earth to Qo’noS in just under four days. While this journey is widely regarded a fluke, warp travel along the corridor is substantially quicker than in other regions of the galaxy.
[8] The 1st Fleet was and remains the primary exploratory formation of the Federation Star Fleet. Based out of Starbase One, it has no overt operating area; instead, it’s vessels act on independent exploratory patrol across the Treaty Zone. All three- and five-year mission vessels are commanded by the 1st Fleet. 5th Fleet is the main tactical formation along the Romulan border. It gained the nickname “the blue fleet” during the four years’ war, when it was commanded and manned almost entirely by Andorians.
[9] April’s defense of the independent purview of his 5-ship “Constitution bloc” was backed by Ch’Shukar, who understood the necessity of the “Starship Class” being able to fly the flag anywhere in the Federation, or act as the core of a rapid reaction force. April’s thesis would be proved right during the Gorn raiding crisis of 59-60, when Enterprise and Achilles both confronted Gorn cruisers; only Achilles managed to achieve a tactical victory.
[10] Memorandum from Chief of Operations, Klingon Command to All Command Officers, Klingon Command., January 11th 2260. Starfleet Archives, San Francisco.
[11] Admiral Rittenhouse to the Federation Security Council, February 15th 2260. Starfleet Archives, San Francisco.
[12] With the retirement of the Europa and Hoover, the only remaining Class I vessels in service in 2260 were the Constitution, Kirov, Perseus and Bonhomme Richard class vessels. As of January 2260, there were only 44 Heavy Cruisers in the entirety of Starfleet; 12 of which were assigned to Klingon Command.
[13] The D18 “Gull” was designed and commissioned in 2263 as a direct counter to the Saladin.
[14] Despite their names, CRURON and DESRON units were not entirely formed of Cruisers and Destroyers. CRUON units included heavy frigates and Exploratory “Long Range” Cruisers, while DESRONs included Scouts, Light Frigates, Escorts, Corvettes and other unrated craft.
[15] While initially, Transport Command would use versions of the Antares Class, these would be phased out in early 2262 for the Starmaster-Class Tender. STARRON units did not require fleet tenders, thanks to the independent cruising requirement of all Starships.
[16] These rumours would be proved correct; the B-1 Battleship “Sto-vo-kor” had been launched at the end of 2259, after a nauseating 15 years of intermittent construction. Her sister vessel, IKS Kahless, would be built in a merely 22 months. The launching of 6 B-10s between the end of 2259 and the end of 2261 would cause a mild panic in Starfleet.
[17] The use of the phrase ‘heavy support’ for the CRURONs is somewhat of an overstatement. Until the mid-2260s, most Cruiser Squadrons (and their relative formations in the Exploratory Fleets) were primarily formed of “utility cruisers” like the Pioneer and Capella, which (despite their decent firepower) were short-ranged vessels built for support roles, not frontline combat. While the Radiant and Sentinel classes were commissioned as combat-ready replacements, the former was plagued by construction issues, while the latter was never available in significant enough numbers to replace the Utility Cruisers. Their place would mostly be filled by Kirov and Ranger class vessels from 2265 onwards. Pioneer would be phased out at the end of the 2270s, while the Capella remains in service as a convoy escort and merchant marine auxiliary ship.
[18] Zh’zhenoth had been one of the key officials who pushed for the activation of the Acuturian “Warborn” military caste during the 2256-57 war. Zh’zhenoth had also, as a junior councillor in the early 2250s, been the deciding vote on the approval ballot for the Atlas Class Cruiser. Atlas and her six sister ships were eventually commissioned (at twice the cost and three times estimated the construction time) as Perimeter Action Vessels: Starfleet euphemism for battleships, before reclassification as Battle cruisers.
[19] With the creation of the Office of Commanding Officer, Starfleet Operational Command, the Chief of Staff assumed a more holistic role, forming a vital link between the supporting and administrative elements of Starfleet and frontline assets.
[20] Starbase Yorktown was the plan to build an orbital Starbase with the civilian facilities and community of a planetary base. If built, it would have had a population of over 300,000, along with facilities to build 5 Starships at a single time alongside a docking and repair facility twice the size of Starbase One. Earth Spacedock would be eventually finished in 2275.
[21] The Kearsage was a “New Light Cruiser”, designed just after the Klingon War and first unveiled during the Shukar report’s deliberations with the council in summer 2258. It proved to be a dead-end design, and only 6 would be built before they would be cancelled. Their successor – Tycho Shipyards’ Sentinel Class – would have a stronger career.
[22] The OSFP remains the only non-radical formal political party to retain represented on the Federation Council.
[23] When the Grand Vizier of Krios refused to hand over the Royal Palace to the new Klingon government, the Imperial governor let his troops loose on the Regal District of the capital. Over 2,000 people were killed, and the entire district was torched. The area was later demolished entirely to make space for the Krios Imperial Compound.
[24] While it is uncodified, several colony worlds have received direct representation by directive/executive order, referendum or (in the case of the New Paris colonies) Presidential decree. The United Earth Constitution has, since Martian Independence, allows for independence to be declared unilateral under certain circumstances.
[25] The Colonial Reform Act (2264) would provide democratic purview and oversight over the Starbase courts, and in many cases replace the Commodore with a civilian judge (or a member of the JAG Corps) on most bases.
[26] It is worth noting that the largest of these businesses – the mining firm United PowNoq Excavation – would eventually collapse after it was indicted for illegal mining on Coridan. Its insolvency would bring down not just the incumbent, but the following three Tellarite Parliamentary Councils through long-term fallout.
[27] The planetoid Babel has served as a location for diplomatic summits since the beginning of the 22nd Century. Throughout the early Federation, the conferences were held on an ad-hoc basis, usually to solve constitutional issues and external concerns relating to regional powers. After the “Grand Conference” of 2236, the Babel Conference was enshrined in the charter as a way for the council to deliberate on critical issues outside of the political enviroment of Paris.
[28] While L’Rell (and Klingon annals) would put his immunity down to his great personal will, TK Rogers reckoned it was probably down to his HRT treatment.
[29] The darsek, the Klingon currency, was increasingly undercut by the universal usage of Gold-pressed latinum and the influx of Federation Credits through the Triangle.
[30] The total Garrison strength planetwide was around 22,000: 2/3rd of the paper strength of a “Occupation Corps”. Even though original unit was mainly forms of second line troops, most of them had already been siphoned out to form new Garrison units in the Enolia sector.
[31] A ‘poverty line’ is the arbitrary line of standard of living under which someone is considered to be living in state negligible to their physical, mental and social health.
[32] The use of the word “Council” is the best translation of available of the Klingon word, though “Unified Government” is sometimes used as well.
[33] “pIpyaH” (pronounced Pich-yah) roughly translates as “Payslip”, in reference both to the payslips that started the riots on Mastocal and the general desire to “get what we are owed”.
[34] It also helps that gagh – the staple meat of Klingon society – is best grown in small, easy to contain tanks containing the dirt the worms are native to.
[35] See Richard Williamson’s Against the Grains (New York, 2303) for a fabulous comparative study of agricultural practice across the Alpha and Beta Quadrant.
[36] Those who worked service jobs were generally exempted from this ire, as were most of the ‘professional’ classes such as teachers, doctors and technicians. Lawyers were still considered a sophisticated form of wage slave though, but this stigma was increasingly less seen (especially within the Imperial core) as the 23rd century went on.
[37] It is important to clarify that Klingon ‘cottage’ industries could scale from small rural weavers and woodworkers to planetwide luxury goods companies like Mep’lec Outfitters.
[38] This last right is most likely based on protecting the workers from falling prey to bandits, enemy raiding parties or the local wildlife.
[39] Savan labour had been outlawed on most of the Imperial core worlds by the 2240s, ostensibly to show that there were “centres of prosperity, culture and honour”: it had essentially been done so that the state could ‘free’ all the Savan workers on the homeworld and just wash their hands of any obligation to them.
[40] It is worth noting at this point that the first Klingon railway, the Imperial Transfer, was constructed and managed by skilled Savan Labour alongside wage work.
[41] This practice – of renting Savan Labour to the state – was uncommon but would form the core of how Sturka would manipulate the practice across the 2260s.
[42] The Ba’Clar duchies had been formed in the early 22nd century by a fringe collection of minor houses who, along with many of their people, had decamped from within the Empire to avoid repression (and, more importantly, tax collection). Their fragile government would collapse in 2260, and most of their territory would be annexed by the Romulan Empire.
[43] The democratic experiments were (and are) obsessed over by Federation Political Scientists. They were, however, uncommon, and only occupied in two cases. None involved total universal suffrage, or a completely independent legislature.
[44] The exact origin of the Raktajino is relatively unknown. The hagiography points to a skirmish between a group of Human and Klingon settlers on the planet Re’Vac (Thornton’s World) in the mid-2220s. Whlle negotiating a truce, both leaders offered each other drinks; human cappuccino and Klingon spice wine. The Human negotiator, later into the negotiations, accidentally poured spice wine into the Klingon’s cup; the resulting concoction was, however, appetising to both parties. While this story is rather neat (and heart-warming for peace activists), it is more likely that the drink emerged in the 2230s through cultural exchange between the independent settlements in the borderlands. Klingons have, themselves, been drinking coffee since the mid-2160s, where it gained the native name qa’vIn.
[45] The Toran Savan-ak was the largest front, but it was spread out across much empire deep in the Beta quadrant. Little is really known about them.
[46] The Quch’Ha – “unclean” – are those Klingon who lack forehead ridges due to the Augment virus of the mid 2150s. For much of the 2260s, they formed a central part of the military – both due to their ostracization, and eventual loyalty to the Sturka government that would emancipate them.