Star Trek Hunter
Episode 27: The Sword of Destiny
Scene 7: tagh 'oH
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27.7
tagh 'oH*
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The Imperial Romulan Warship Fero was burning in space. The gigantic battlegod had been cut into several pieces. One of the largest compartments, containing a living ocean, had broken open and the entire massive body of water had flowed out in two large segments only to be frozen hard in the vacuum of space. Everything that had lived in that ocean, including several pods of a large, whale-like species, was now frozen hard inside it. Hundreds of thousands of bodies, some whole, others in pieces, drifted in near space around the wreck of the Fero – Romulans. Klingons. Hemra. A few humans.
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The Romulan Star Navy had built these enormous battlegods to take on a borg cube, but as the gamma wave front sterilized one world after another in the empire, these behemoth ships had become the lynchpin in romulan conservation efforts. Each ship carried dozens of unique environments rescued from planets in advance of the deadly wave front. These had now spilled out into space, exposing thousands of plant and animal species to the frozen vacuum, causing the extinction of many of these species that had barely been rescued from their home planets.
Millions of tons of soil drifted around the wreck of the I.R.W. Fero, exposing millions of microbial species to the deadly background cosmic radiation, spelling the final end for entire biospheres.
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The wreck of an Intrepid class Star Fleet vessel was entirely dwarfed next to the Fero. Both the engineering hull and the saucer section had been ripped in half, leaving the ship in three large pieces, all of them mostly exposed to space.
Nineteen klingon ships were also adrift, inert in the wash of the battle, their hulls also open to space – a K'mpec class scout, a few birds of prey, several Vor'cha class cruisers and two of the new Martok class cruisers. Smaller wrecks indicated that about a dozen one- and two-man interceptors had also taken part in this battle. The markings identified these as belonging to the Vulcan High Command in Exile.
Tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people might have survived this battle and might have been clinging to life within various sections of the wreckage – especially what was left of the enormous Fero – but no one was coming to the rescue.
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On a dozen worlds, most significantly Vulcan, Rising Sun and Saketh, the klingons had once again taught the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire the harsh truth that it was impossible to prevent a determined enemy from establishing a beachhead and on those well settled worlds the klingons had established several well defended landing zones and were breaking out from them. The once beautiful cities of the Soda Toer Archipelago on Rising Sun and Saf Harbor on Saketh were now bombed out battlegrounds with families fleeing in every direction in a desperate attempt to escape the omnipresent fighting. Some of the resistance was organized – Star Fleet Planetary Defense forces and local romulan militias quickly armed with rudimentary training. Far more of the resistance was improvised – outlaw gangs and local police forces working together to set traps and try to create safe zones.
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*tagh 'oH (thlingn Hol - It Begins)
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27.7
