Captains Log: Stardate 67774.99 (2771 A.D. 417 years after the Dominion war)
Starfleet Captains do not die. We do not give up. We do not surrender. We negotiate where needed, eliminate with extreme prejudice as necessary. We are taught not to fail. We innovate our ways out of situations that most consider impossible. That is why we do what we do. And we love it. A Captaincy is the most sought after and coveted job in the universe. We are the most feared beings in known space. When a Starfleet vessel shows up at your door, you pay attention, and you pay attention most closely to the Captain of the ship, if you have any interest in learning anything of life. Because as Captains, we are the lives of our ships and crewmen, and they are us. We are nothing without each other, each and every crewmen watching the back of the Starfleet officer behind him. And the Captain oversees it all, the hustle and bustle of the ships doings as she runs about her business. I am my ship. My heart beats in sync with her engines as they propel us all toward our destination.
Kronos has been abandoned for 140 years, and the Klingon race is on the verge of extinction. The last Klingon Ambassador to the Federation died almost 80 years ago. It is the Honorable's mission to traverse Klingon territory, what little of it remains, and determine the status of the Klingon High Council. We are almost a month into the trip, and we have seen not a single Klingon military vessel. The few private ships we have encountered seemed to date too about 100 years ago, which coincides with the last days of contact with the Empire. There seems too be little information regarding that particular time period, not only on their side of the record keeping, but ours as well. The Borg Temporal War had just ended a few years before, and I am assuming Starfleet was undermanned in that regard. This doesn't help me now though. I am going into this situation blind, carrying myself and 178 other crewmen aboard the ship, as well as their families.
What do I tell them of our message? Do I tell them that I bring peace, or death with my vessel. I have no clear orders, only to establish contact with the Klingon command structure in place when I arrive at Kronos. Kronos itself still remains brutalized after the Temporal war, with huge remnants of the planet still uninhabitable, and a massively diminished population, one that can barely keep itself alive. This is all second hand information, received through Starfleet Intelligence operatives from questionable sources. How much of it I can trust, I hesitate to even guess. I was brought up through Intelligence and know just how compromised our information is, sometimes 100 or 200 years out of date, reports being refreshed with no new intelligence to offer. The file that was sent to me for briefing on this mission was the same reports that I had read in the Academy to learn about the Klingons. I am used to going into situations blind, but this is a different level. This is the Federation contacting the Klingon Empire again. This is a new beginning, a fresh start. The Borg are gone, haven't been heard from in a century. The Klingons have had time to rebuild their culture, what little remained. The Klingons had of course refused the outside help, and it had taken them years to get a shielding system in place. Kronos had been completely assimilated. Two outer colonies had survived, almost 50 million Klingons per colony surviving. There were countless other smaller colonies spread throughout the Empire, and the Federation hasn't heard from any of them. From what we can gather, no new ships, no industry whatsoever had been done in the Empire for well over 70 years. They are a ruined species. I feel sorry for them. With the history of the Empire, who in the late years before the Temporal War turned to be great allies of Starfleet and the Federation, even with all the previous violence that had occurred between our two cultures…End Captains Log.
Starship Honorable. Sector 379,
The Honorable was a Proletarian class vessel, and while in a way a classically designed Starfleet vessel, she was nothing like the usual definition of a scout vessel. She had been built during the Trans-Warp war and would probably have been considered a relic under most circumstances, but in these days she was as cutting edge as it got. Her two nacelles were tucked safely below the elongated saucer section, most of her squat weight devoted to the huge layered duranium shields that surrounded the living quarters, all of which jutted outwards, melding into the duranium armor's central repair points for easy access. The entire ship was composed of multi-layered phased particle shields, no actual walls, all surrounded by the duranium shields. She was one of the only classes of vehicle ever built by a civilized culture to fight the Borg. The true beauty of the ship was a feature she hadn't used since the end of the war, which was that all of those shields could be detached and used as huge physical weapons, leaving the saucer section to fend for itself afterwards, still more then formidably armed and armored. That tech was so rarely called for these days. There were no military engagements anymore. There was no one in the galaxy that could possibly offer any resistance now. The Federation was engaging now in using their recently gained slipstream technology to aid other cultures throughout the galaxy, entire systems that had been destroyed by the Borg and then left to die, not even deemed worth assimilation, their planets wiped clean with chemical-nano viruses, viruses that left nothing organic alive, and dissolved all the basic elements to dust, within a century leaving not even a trace of a planet. A planet disappearing, depending on the size and location in a given system, could be catastrophic for the entire system, given the right set of circumstances.
The Honorable was moving through slip-stream space, moving at roughly Warp 42.5 through local space, but not quite occupying any physical space either. When she reverted to realspace she re-emerged in high local orbit of the planet Kronos, which was the last known seat of any Klingon government. There were no ships occupying the territory, nothing on long range scanners that even hinted at recent ship movements in the sector. It was a ghost town, as the saying went.