Personal log, stardate 86363.

Well, our luck had to run out eventually.

Now in its fifth month, the Federation–Klingon war was wearing on everyone, Klingon warrior and Federation captain alike. The reason the war was so indecisive was that Federation and Klingon technology was so identical due to many years of technology-exchange programs. Neither side had any weapons technology in R&D, and while weapons research was fast-tracked, no one had come anywhere close to a breakthrough. Until one side gained a technological advantage, the war would continue indefinitely. And, most likely, once one side did gain such an advantage, there would be no saving the other side.

I was contacted by Commodore Burgess at Starfleet Intelligence. A source within the Klingon military has contacted Starfleet, claiming to be working in the proximity of Admiral B'vat. He claimed that the Klingons were testing a new kind of weapon, which he described as a doomsday machine. They were close to being able to bring it to bear against Federation worlds. Our vessel was to warp to the Donia system and extract the Federation's contact, then take whatever steps are necessary to capture or destroy the doomsday weapon.

Donia was nowhere nearby, but we were the only Starfleet vessel not being tracked by Klingon Intelligence. Now I understand why we were kept in the backwoods for so long without orders. The Klingons would not have known about our existence because we had never participated in any battles.

When we arrived in the Donia system, I was very surprised to see how lightly it was defended. One bird-of-prey and nothing else. I surmised that the whatever-it-is would be cloaked or hidden in the system's asteroid belt (or both).

The bird-of-prey hailed us. The Klingon captain, Admiral K'Valk, immediately asked for asylum for himself and the crew of his starship. Apparently, K'Valk was the brother of the now-dead High Counsellor for the Pagf family. While remaining at B'Vat's side, and in the presence of J'mpok, since the war started, he has come to hate J'mpok and eventually decided it would not be honorable to let such a dishonorable man lead the Empire.

However, he knew he had nowhere near the military strength to follow through on his decision. He therefore decided to go to the Federation and ally himself with us. The Klingon base is not in this system; this is just where K'Valk chose to disappear to.

I was stunned — and incredibly joyous. Even a race as militaristic as the Klingon Empire would have dissenting political voices, I reasoned, and some of them might be anti-war. My theory had been proven correct, and I am even more happy to hear that the war with the Federation is turning out as unpopular. Perhaps we can end the war through diplomacy after all.

I contacted Starfleet Command; they sent the USS Greenberg, a Galaxy-class ship, to the Donia system to pick up the crew of K'Valk's warbird. They arrived within the hour. However, K'Val had another subject to discuss with me. The doomsday weapon he mentioned is very real. It is located in the Imaga system, and it is extremely close to becoming fully functional.

Starfleet took K'Valk's story seriously, but the Imaga system is too far into Klingon territory for any starship to be able to travel to. K'Valk stated that he was willing to use his warbird to host a joint Federation–Klingon team, with him leading it, to travel to the Imaga system undercover. I asked what Starfleet thought of this and they said that the Federation was planning on asking for his warbird to perform an undercover attack in just the same fashion. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to assemble a proper strike team, so the crew of my starship and the Greenberg would have to do.

K'Valk said that he wanted me to lead the Federation part of the team personally. He had apparently read about our pre-war exploits from smuggled Federation records, and he was very impressed with my level of courage and my remarkable success. There is no such thing as luck in Klingon society, he says; fortune favors the bold, and I had proven myself so successful that he would want no warrior less to lead our forces into battle. I was flattered. (When all of this is over, I will have to speak with Starfleet about the security of our records. He clearly knew about the mission to Drozana Station, which I was told would be classified.)

There was no argument, really. I agreed to lead the strike team into Klingon space, even though captains aren't really supposed to put themselves into that kind of danger. We put on blast vests and stuffed the pockets as full of equipment as they could be. Heavy phaser rifles in hand, we boarded K'Valk's ship, and off we went.

We encountered numerous Klingon vessels. None of them suspected that anything was wrong, because the Starfleet personnel stayed well away from the bridge. Most of them just wanted to exchange pleasantries.

As we began to enter Klingon space proper, we were stopped by a larger vessel. A low-level Klingon captain on his first space mission was instructed to patrol the border, and to stop any ship that does not belong. We had no flight plan on file with Klingon High Command, and he wanted to know where we were going. However, K'Valk was able to pull rank. As far as anyone else was concerned, he was on state business by order of the High Council itself. The poor captain was humiliated. We continued on.

We eventually engaged the cloaking device. A good thing, too, as Imaga was guarded by several layers of patrol ships. K'Valk might not be able to talk his way through these guards.

We arrived at Imaga ready for battle. In orbit over the planet was a huge, tapered cylinder made of a silver metal. I recognized it immediately.

On stardate 4202.1, Commodore Decker of the USS Constellation encountered a vessel matching the description of this one in system L-374. It was called the planet killer. It was an automated device that moved autonomously from system to system, cutting planets into rubble and then digesting them as fuel. The Constellation was all but destroyed, but after a rendezvous with the USS Enterprise, Decker agreed to pilot the ship on a suicide run, driving the wreck of the Constellation into the mouth of the planet killer while wired to auto-destruct. The resulting explosion disabled it. He was decorated posthumously.

But no one wrote down what happened to the planet killer afterward. It was assumed Kirk just left it there because it was no longer dangerous. The L-370 systems were on a trajectory directly up and out of the galaxy, nowhere near anyone's space or any other planets, inhabited or otherwise. Most likely, no one would visit this sector again.

At this point K'Valk explained what he knew of the device. Klingon spies managed to obtain the Starfleet records for this incident, but they were filed and never read. Now, everyone was scrambling to find a new weapons technology. Someone unearthed the record and decided to haul the planet killer to the Imaga system for inspection. (It was so massive that the entire Second Fleet needed to be called out before their tractor beams could pull the thing. This was over five thousand ships.)

The ship was very much piloted by an artificial intelligence. It was programmed to destroy planets, presumably to fight an an ancient war. Exactly what war this was about, or who the belligerents were, has been lost to time. (Time is infinite. Storage space is not. The planet killer is programmed to overwrite its oldest files when it runs out of space for new ones. Since the planet killer is billions of years old, information about the ancient war would have been overwritten billions of years ago.)

There was a stop signal. This was composed of what looks like some form of anthem (played at tones far above our hearing range), sent over subspace band three-alpha-ninety. When the planet killer received that signal, it would shut down immediately. But the question the Klingons wanted answered is this: can it be turned back on? This vessel would make an unstoppable weapon in the war against the Federation.

And, to my horror, it was working. They established a control center bolted to the top of the planet killer. From there the Klingons had created a series of subspace signals that would control the ship. They had movement in the X and Z axes. They had fire control. They had also managed to rig defensive shielding around the entire ship. Right now they were running the final tests before they begin their shakedown cruise.

K'Valk was shocked at how much progress had been made in his absence. I was shocked that the Klingons made everything work on that kind of schedule. In the Klingon fleet, scientists must also serve as infantry, and they usually die the latter. As a result, quality scientists in the Klingon fleet are very hard to come by. I would have thought it would take the Klingons much more time to even assemble a science team.

And we were too late. With a huge heave and a blast of radiation, the planet killer started to accelerate. I quickly determined that it would take up to thirty minutes for the planet killer to have enough speed to be able to maneuver. We had that long to stop them.

At this point K'Valk's ship was immensely helpful. Klingon starships keep full war plans on their local computers as a matter of course. We quickly learned that there was only one small picket vessel guarding the planet killer. It was deemed able to guard itself. We came out of cloak and destroyed the picket ship before they knew what hit them. Then we cloaked again.

We had twenty-three minutes remaining. The best way to stop the planet killer would not be to beam aboard the control vessel and try to seize it, but they had the entire complement of a D-7 cruiser waiting there. We would need detailed schematics on the machine. They might have been on the picket ship (oops), so now we have to find their base on the planet and beam to that. It took us six precious minutes to taxi to transporter position.

When my team and I materialized, there were several Klingons in the room. My crew shot them immediately, but one was still able to raise the alarm. Fortunately, there was only one way into or out of the room we were in, which made it easily defensible. There were not very many Klingons in the facility, either. I started to fuss with the main computer.

Klingons are very lazy when it comes to their computer equipment. They don't even have a screen lock on their terminals. Probably thought that any intruder would be long dead by the time they got here. I paged through the files. Unfortunately, I can't read Klingon. I copied some twenty or thirty files onto a storage device before I called for beam-out.

Once we were back on our ship, we were able to use its universal translator to make sense of the files. They were completely irrelevant. Damn! However, while reviewing transmission logs, I found something very interesting. There were messages between the base and the IKS Arka'bras about maintaining a supply of what were called harg-peng torpedoes. Apparently there were several harg-peng torpedoes on board the Arka'bras, and every one of them is capable of destroying the planet killer should it be shot down the creature's maw. This was clearly the Klingons' backup plan in case they could not control the machine. That was all the information we needed.

We had thirteen minutes remaining. A quick check of the Klingon plans revealed that the IKS Arka'bras was assigned to monitor these proceedings while cloaked. Since we destroyed the picket ship earlier, everyone knew we were here. I would never have destroyed that picket ship. If no one knew we were here, we would be able to exploit passive communications between Klingon vessels to locate the Arka'bras. But now all communications would be on lock-down. (The attack was K'Valk's idea, and I should have voiced an objection. I feel really guilty about that.)

At this point our timer expired. Since we had destroyed the picket ship, the crew on the planet killer knew there was a cloaked vessel nearby. The planet killer started to turn. A machine that big would be subject to inertial pressures, rendering them less maneuverable than we were.

The machine sent out a blast. Pure anti-proton, absolutely pure. If we were in the path of that beam we would have been vaporized. The machine started to fire in different directions, trying to locate us.

My pilot came up with an inventive option. Since it was becoming clear the Klingons were firing in a blanket pattern, trying to hit us, they would be methodically blasting all the way around a 360° circle. We could take advantage of the fact that most gunnery crews would not think of looking in the location they just blasted. Brilliant.

It actually worked. After expending a great amount of energy, the planet killer stopped firing. We intercepted a message: Hostile ship no longer in area. Continuing with testing plan. (We were so fast that they didn't have time to pin us as a warbird. They still don't know what to look for. We needed to keep it this way as long as possible.) The planet killer made a large turn and set course back towards the planet.

I never thought the Klingons' plan was to test the planet-killing part on the planet they were just orbiting, especially because there were Klingon soldiers down there. But that is exactly what they did. Before we could even realize they were firing, they cut Imaga IV in half. Another blast. Quarters. More blasts. Reducing the planet to rubble. The captain on the planet-killer was clearly having a very good time.

My science officer actually looked away when he saw the Klingons attack the planet, unwilling to face that much death. I will have to give him a commendation for this. He took the auxiliary sensor station and scanned for survivors. He found numerous transporter beams. Apparently the Klingons did evacuate their personnel.

But they did not evacuate them to the planet killer, as the trajectory went in a completely different direction. We were therefore able to pinpoint the location they beamed to, and we opened fire.

The Arka'bras lost its cloaking device with the first round. Our cloaking device sputtered and died, because the Klingons tried to fire weapons while the vessel is still cloaked. If we had only decloaked first, our cloaking device would still be intact for the trip back to Federation space, assuming we actually survive this. But no, the cloak was up, and now the cloaking generator requires about ten hours' repair work before we can use it again. Were we to actually destroy this thing, we would then need to book to Federation territory. Without a cloaking device, the entire Klingon fleet would come after us. I cried out in exasperation when I saw the cloaking indicator go. They need to think of things like that!

But we could see the Arka'bras. The Klingon crew was doing a remarkable job firing at them. Eventually they were disabled, listing in space. Turning my attention back to the scanner, I identified the firing tubes for the harg-peng torpedoes. We would not be able to fire them if we beamed them out. We needed to control that ship's bridge, and fire the torpedoes from there.

Suicide. We would never be able to hijack an entire starship full of troopers with only twelve guys. But the Klingons were raring to try. A good day to die! One of them was all but dragging me to the transporter room.

We decided to go for maximum surprise and beam directly into the main bridge. It worked. We were able to take down the entire bridge crew without issue. However, I then discovered that Klingon starships are designed without doors to seal off the main bridge — for exactly this reason! Someone would realize something was wrong when they attempted to contact the bridge.

For several tense minutes, this did not occur. We turned the Arka'bras to point towards the planet killer. We would need to fire the torpedo straight down its maw without being disintegrated by one of its blasts.

I decided to disintegrate the leads for the bridge communications, to make it look like they were destroyed by external weapons fire. But a moment too late! Someone had just got on the com when I finished pulling wires out. Soon thereafter, an alarm sounded.

I told the Klingons to use their disruptor pistols before their bat'leths, so we could hold this position for longer. There was serious groaning, but K'Valk ordered them to obey. The Klingons took up position at the doors with their disruptors, alongside the Starfleet crew with our phasers, and we awaited the first assault team.

I turned to look at the pilot controls again, and then bang! I heard the sound of weapons fire. I was now working on a very strict clock, and I really had no idea what tactics I should employ. If only Anne Potter was here!

One of the Starfleet crew was looking at one of the scanners and not participating in the defense, instead looking up information on the planet killer. I will have to give this individual a commendation as well.

Then I heard the sound of clanging bat'leths. The enemies had reached hand-to-hand range. But we had no fewer than twenty Klingons to fight off a corridor that only allows one person to enter at a time. Klingon's aren't that smart. I was running out of time.

The man on the scanners shouted to me, "That thing has a five-second charge period between shots!" That was all I needed to know. I immediately started piloting the Arka'bras towards the maw of the planet killer at maximum speed. We flew past at maximum speed right into the thing's maw. The commanding officer of the machine clearly had no idea why the Arka'bras was doing this, which is why he didn't fire. I launched the harg-peng torpedoes, which was thankfully a completely automated process, and it was over.

Someone grabbed my shoulder. One of the Klingons had caught me while I had my back to him. He swung his bat'leth towards my head. But an instant before he split my skull in two, he was decapitated by the blade of another Klingon standing behind him. What goes around comes around.

At this point, there was total chaos in the bridge. The assault teams had overrun our defense posts and it was now every man for himself. I hit my combadge and tried to shout over the carnage. "Beam us out! Beam us out!" A moment later, we were gone.

I was very worried that the transporter would pull a number of hostiles over with us because the room was so chaotic. However, we had beamed back seven Starfleet crew members, as well as K'Valk and two of his men, and no hostiles. Everyone else was dead. The transporter officer told me that he spent the entire period we were on the Arka'bras refining his transporter lock. Were they still alive, he could have easily pulled all twenty members of my crew and the Klingon crew out without any risk of beaming over anyone else.

By this point I was heading back to the bridge. The Arka'bras was putting out a very weak distress signal. If we were to book, we could make it out of the system before anyone arrived, but the rest of the Klingon fleet would not leave us alone once the survivors on the Arka'bras explain what happened. We were in the heart of Klingon territory, without a working cloaking device.

I was considering various ways we could outrun the Klingon fleet through fancy flying. It would take about thirteen hours at maximum warp to get us out to neutral space, and our cloaking device could be online within ten. However, I would only be able to outrun the Klingon fleet for two hours, and there would be far too many after us to lose them in an asteroid belt or something. However, we then detected another, much larger, Klingon ship entering the system. He came out of warp right on top of the Arka'bras and caught it in a tractor beam, then hailed us. Why?

He said he was Broqq son of Norwad, head of the House of Tannon. He was the commanding general for the Sixth Fleet, and this was his flagship. Before I could say a word he started talking. The planet killer project was not a popular one among certain parts of the Klingon military. Namely, himself. He told J'mpok many times that this is not an easy-fire one-shot superweapon that would win the war for them immediately. It is a tool, like any other strategic element, with weaknesses that must be accounted for. J'mpok didn't listen. And then J'mpok insulted him by assigning soldiers to the worthless project from his command only. He eventually left Qo'noS after getting tired of being ignored. Now that he can bring back evidence that he was right, Broqq was not just willing but happy to escort our vessel back to Federation space. He also offered to take on K'Valk and the two surviving Klingons; they accepted. It all ended well.

Computer, end recording.