The Snake and the Dragon (Draka final society vs...)

[darthdavid]

You definately refrenced Sonnenburg's series.

[Prozac the Robert]

The Japanese officer is from Pablo's fic, right?

[Junghalli]

You definately refrenced Sonnenburg's series.

Correct. It was Blood of Heroes, where Janeway turned into some kind of uber-Sith. The Draka's national character shield was actually psycho Janeway continuously giving them a helping hand at critical points in their history, in the hopes of creating a human society vicious enough to unite the galaxy by conquest and beat the Empire.

The Japanese officer is from Pablo's fic, right?

<Gives Prozac and Darthdavid cookies>. Gotta love the many worlds theory.

[Junghalli]

Alliance Secretary of Defense Clark divided his attention between the presentation of his aide Emily Lafarge and the reaction that presentation was causing in Rear Admiral Sheppard and the Klingon Grand Admiral Durandal. It was amazing how like-minded the two men were, even though they were different species. He was sure what they were hearing now must be pure torture for them.

“The simple fact is the Dominate has the advantage in this war gentleman” the short, stocky, light blonde, fiftyish woman was explaining. “They control large areas of the resource-rich Alpha Quadrant, while most of our holdings are in the Beta Quadrant, which is resource poor and has few habitable worlds. So we have come up with the following strategy” her pointed jabbed the galactic map projected on the wall of the darkened room. “First, we withdraw our Beta Quadrant Frontier Fleets to defend our core worlds. There are no threats to us in the deep Beta Quadrant at all, because quite simply there’s nobody there at all except us and the Klingon Empire” her wand next moved to the Alliance’s border with the former Romulan Empire. “These colonies and military bases are untenable over the long term, they should be evacuated. We should also evacuate as many deep Beta Quadrant colonies as possible, because as things stand the Draka could easily cut them off from our core worlds. Many minor colonies close to the homeworld core of the Dominate are likewise untenable. I recommend we withdraw all our assets and concentrate them in our own homeworld core, making it unassailable.”

The look on Durandal and Sheppard’s faces when they heard this was simply priceless. “You cannot be serious!” the Klingon roared.

Lafarge continued. “Our recommendation for the Klingon Empire would be to likewise evacuate most of its deep Beta Quadrant colonies and consolidate its homeworld core and other vital territories.”

“Are you actually telling me that your plan for winning this war is to voluntarily give up two thirds of our empire to the Draka?”

“You wouldn’t be giving up two thirds of your empire” Lafarge pointed out. “All the territories I proposed evacuating are, by in large, sparsely populated. Effectively you would be evacuating the equivalent of a single one of your larger colonies.”

“We would be giving up vast natural resources!” Durandal screamed. “Natural resources that we need to build the ships and the planes and the guns that we are going to need for the war effort.”

“Not at all” Lafarge countered. “These natural resources you’re talking about are underexploited anyway. You’ll be giving up an immense drain on your military from having to hold on to damn-near-worthless planet after damn-near-worthless planet just because it has the equivalent of a very small city’s population on it.”

“And that is not all!” Durandal shouted. “We would be effectively handing over our territory to our worst enemies! Do you think it will be so easy to reclaim these planets once the Draka have moved in and established garrisons and fortifications?”

“Of course not” Lafarge said. “But there are over two hundred billion stars in the galaxy, and plenty of planets to go around.”

“Not for the Draka” Durandal said. “There is a saying from your planet to the effect that five beggars may share a blanket but to two kings an entire kingdom is not big enough. So it is with the Draka. They are too enamored of their own image of themselves as a species predestined to rule the universe to ever live in peace with us, or any other race. Go forward with this insane plan of yours and they will move into our former colonies, exploit them, and build up their strength until they are strong enough to crush our ‘unassailable’ core systems. That is their way.”

“Well, since the alternative is giving the Draka your homeworlds in this war, I think it’s a chance we should be willing to take” Lafarge said.

Durandal’s voice dropped to a cold, neutral tone. “There was a period of many years when you had molehole drive and the Draka did not. You could easily have crushed them then, and destroyed them forever. For years I was never able to understand how you did not take the opportunity, how you could possibly have let it slip by. Now I think I know. Go ahead; cut your own hands off, but the Klingon Empire will have nothing to do with this madness. Go through with this and our joint operations end!”

Lafarge coughed. “Well, if there are no further objections… Particularly worrying is our position at Bajor. It’s absolutely vital we hold it, as it’s the only link we have with our colonies and protectorates in the Gamma Quadrant, some of which are quite valuable. But it’s deep inside Dominate territory-”

“I don’t think it’s worrying at all” Admiral Sheppard interrupted.

“You have something to add, Admiral?” Clark asked.

“It’s a stroke of luck” Sheppard elucidated. “It’ll let us hit their Cardassian conquests from one of the most secure, heavily defended systems in the quadrant.”

“I-hadn’t thought of it that way” Lafarge admitted.

“I know” Sheppard said, warming up. “That’s your problem. Flavius, perhaps you’d like to give your report now.” Sheppard indicated a small, academic looking man in the back row. Flavius was a native of Magna Roma, a planet with a culture remarkably similar to ancient Rome, but which had achieved a nuclear-power level of technology by the time the first Alliance survey ship had found it. Today it was a prominent member of the Alliance. He was one of his world’s foremost experts on the Dominate’s culture and society.

Flavius organized his papers a little and began. “The Dominate of Drakia has certain, very noticeable similarities to another society in the ancient history of your planet, namely Sparta. Both societies are heavily reliant on slave labor, and in both societies the slaves vastly outnumber the masters. In order to prevent widespread revolt it was necessary for the masters to rule by fear of force. Notice that I say fear of force, not force itself, because both these societies would collapse in the face of collective revolt. In order to do this the masters developed extreme martial prowess. This was not so much to make themselves better fighters per se, but more to cultivate a certain mystique about them. Their rule depended on their subjects, and their enemies, believing them to be something approaching superhuman beings; indestructible, invincible, and undefeatable. This image was carefully maintained and any sign of weakness was carefully hidden at great pains. For instance, the Spartan army always marched at night so that nobody would ever realize just how few Spartans there actually were. The reason the mystique was so vital was because, in truth, societies such as these are extremely fragile and indeed continually tottering on the brink of collapse. Their survival depends on the fear of their subjects which makes them pliant, and the fear of their enemies which makes them afraid to stand up to them.”

“All right! You all hear what the man said!” Sheppard’s voice was growing louder now. “The Draka want us to think they’re invincible. They want-no, they need us to think we can’t beat them. They very desperately need us to do the kinds of things Ms. Lafarge here wants us to do now. They need us to cower in fear, shrink back, draw back into ourselves and lay low while they build up until they’re strong enough to take us on. They’ve been conning us, and we’ve been buying it hook, line, and sinker for the past seven hundred years! They’ve had us fooled and they’ve had us fooled good, I’ll hand that to them. Our tacticians and generals were so busy bemoaning their uberness they never noticed that the Draka are weak. That’s right, they’re weak! But the con job ends now ladies and gentlemen, the con job ends now. It’s been damn near a millennium, we should have woken up and smelled the coffee a long time ago. It’s time we realized that our fear is their greatest weapon, and it’s time we deprived them off that weapon and stood up to them face to face and punched them right in that glass jaw of theirs. We’ve been thinking so much about their strengths and our weaknesses that we never stopped to think about our strengths and their weaknesses!” Clark found himself resisting the urge to throw up his hands and shout praise Jesus. Sheppard might be a touch psycho but in some other ways he had a better head on his shoulders than most men, and he was a damn fine speaker.

“Nice speech” Lafarge said. “But maybe you’d like to tell us what this magic Achilles heel is that we’ve been missing all this time.”

“Well, me and Durandal have been doing some thinking, and we’ve got our own plan we’d like to present. If I may” he walked up to the projector, carrying a clipboard under one arm.

“We’ve been looking at their advantages, now let’s look at ours” he suggested. “What you missed Ms. Lafarge is that just because the Draka wiped out the Cardassians and Romulans and Ferengi and all those other species doesn’t make the Dominate equal to the Romulan and Cardassian and Andorian empires put together. Most of the Cardassian, Romulan, and Ferengi worlds were nuked or blasted with Shiva bombs. Half of them are now completely dead, and the rest are just military outposts. The Draka have relatively few actual colonies compared to the Alliance, and no major colonies at all outside the Sol system. They’re prissy and they like their space, so they like to keep their own planets nice and open and clean. Most of their serious industry, and hence their war-production capacity, is concentrated on their conquests, mostly what used to be the major planets of the Romulan and Andorian empires. Planets populated almost entirely by millions of people who, unlike the Servus, do not like being under the yoke any better than you or I would-at least so far, although if we wait long enough I’m sure the Snake bastards will mind-geld them too-and are probably severe drains on their military capacity to keep down. So I say we hit them hard and we hit them were it hurts.” Sheppard took up the pointer and began poking the Dominate’s territories with it. “Strike deep into the old Romulan Empire. Don’t bother with the border outposts, go straight for the Romulan planets the Dominate’s subjugated and liberate them. The Rommies’ll probably give our GIs blow jobs out of gratitude and we’ll add heavily fortified bases deep in Dominate territory, get our hands on some of the Dominate’s bigger naval yards, and take away a huge chunk of their industrial capacity in the bargain. And it’ll shatter the myth of Drakan invincibility for good. I call it Operation McFly; it’s an old literary reference from before the Final War.

“That’s going to take a lot of ships and a lot of men” Clark pointed out.

“That’s true sir” Sheppard acknowledged. “But it took a lot of men to take down the Dominion too. Isn’t this an equally worthy cause? And frankly I’ll be honest, the Dominate’s five times as evil as the Dominion ever was and a lot better armed. It’s time we took these bastards down for the count.”

“The Klingon Empire would be honored to provide fighting men for such a worthy battle, in whatever quantity you deem necessary” Durandal said.

“And besides” Sheppard said “isn’t this so obviously much better than curling up in our own home systems, as Ms. Lafarge would have us do? We can strike the Dominate, God help me we can hurt them and hurt them bad and they deserve every bit of it. They’ve got a lot of hurting heading back their way on the Great Wheel of Karma and I for one consider myself privileged to be one of the men who helps it along.”

[darthdavid]

Yes!

[consequences]

Ah, the truth finally comes out. Whoever the French bitch was that sired the Lefarges secretly enjoyed being fucked by the Snakes so much that the subconscious desire was passed along to her children, and their descendants.

[Junghalli]

CHAPTER 4

At the age of thirty-four Captain Robert Kirk, who happened to be the descendant of an obscure Samothracian auto mechanic named James Tiberius Kirk, was one of the youngest Captains in the Alliance fleet. Granted his command wasn’t anything to really crow about. The Defiant was nothing more than a Freedom class light frigate. Still, it was his, and that said something. He had been present at the disastrous first contact between the Alliance and the Gamma Quadrant’s reigning fascist state; the Dominion. A Dominion V-series superdreadnought had sent a devastating volley of torpedoes into the Endurance class explorer Shackleton, and destroyed most of the forward section, including the bridge. Kirk had been a Senior Engineer at the time, and as the most senior surviving officer he’d taken command of the ship and gone into a solar hide; using some fancy footwork with thrusters and the Shackleton’s badly damaged engine to get the gimped ship behind the shadow of a nearby gas giant and then doing a microjump with the molehole drive into the obscuring glare of the system’s red dwarf primary. Kirk hadn’t seen anything special about it, he’d just acted to save his ship and his own neck while he was at it, but the USN had seen fit to give him his own ship. He supposed that more than anything else it had to do with the fact that the incident marked an important first contact. It was a well recognized truth in the USN that promotion depended on his visibility assignments, and first contact with the Dominion was as high visibility as anything had been in recent years.

“Captain, we are standing by on the jump transition” Navigation announced.

“Good” Kirk observed. “Set a course for Narendra III.”

“Yes sir.”

The Defiant was slowly moving up the face of Camp Khitomer; a Klingon colony planet, sitting close to the border of what had once been Romulan space, was now Draka space-and would soon be United States territory if Robert Kirk and the fighting men of the Seventh Naval Wing out of Columbia had anything to say about it.

“Would you look at that!” Radar said, her awe obvious.

Gathered outside the viewer, in a formation so tight that men looking out the windows could actually see other ships with the naked eye, was one of the greatest armies this part of the quadrant had seen in living memory. Even the mighty fleet which had gathered at the Bajoran wormhole to smash the Dominion had not been as big.

“Yes” Passive agreed from her station right next to Radar. “And there’s supposed to be another fleet just as big massing at Chal! Those Snakes don’t stand a chance!”

Kirk smiled. If the enemy had been anyone other than the Draka he would have almost felt sorry for them. The USN had dug deep into its pockets to come up with the armada now stretched over the skies of Camp Khitomer. The entire Core System Reserve was here, along with most of the Beta Quadrant Frontier Fleet, elements of the Tzen’kethi and Tholian Border Fleets, portions of the Gamma Quadrant Frontier Fleet, most of the Colonial Reserve Fleet, and the entire combined military forces of the Klingon Empire save those absolutely necessary to defend their homeworlds. Standing in the path of this brewing hurricane of destruction were several hundred Drakan military outposts, a little over a dozen minor colonies, and heavily populated industrial worlds full of millions of enserfed Romulans waiting to be liberated. The battle plan was a showpiece of General Mark Sheppard’s philosophy; a swift, vicious, and sudden attack with overwhelming force on Draka outposts and colonies all along the Drakan-Klingon frontier, followed by an audacious lightening strike at the major inhabited worlds deep in the old Romulan Empire. By the time it was over the Romulan Territories of the Dominate were supposed to no longer exist. The Snakes would never know what hit them.

“Heh, time to be skinning those rattlers what do you say?” the Helmsman guffawed as he slapped the Navigator on the back. “What do you say, eh, time to feed those bendejos some napalm eh buddy?” After a moment he realized he was actually talking to a Soong-D series android and turned back to his console with a mixture of embarrassment and some vague creeped out feeling. Kirk could recognize it because the Soongs caused much the same response in him. He didn’t trust them. It wasn’t that they were bad at their jobs; in fact they tended to be considerably superior to organic personnel. But the utter lack of human response aroused a natural distrust in him. They cared about their work and apparently little else, which wasn’t surprising as that was, after all, the way they were designed. Kirk knew his feelings were irrational, but couldn’t help them. And he was a man who went with his gut.

“Captain, Admiral Sheppard is going on the air” Communications said.

“Put him on.” Kirk unconsciously adjusted the collar of his blue USN uniform, even though he knew the Admiral wouldn’t be seeing him. It was an instinctual reaction when confronted with top brass.

Admiral Mark Sheppard filled the small viewing screen of the Defiant (which was perched just above the window). He was a large, aggressive looking man with a moustache, blue eyes, and the air of a drill instructor.

“Men and women of the Khitomer Combined Fleet” he addressed them. “For six hundred years we have fallen back from the Draka. They enserfed countries and we fell back. The exiled us from our own homeworld and we fell back. They invade our space and we fall back. They enslave entire worlds and we fall back. no more!” there was rising passion in his voice now. Kirk thought he’d make a good preacher. “The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther! We have stood by much too long while they grew like a cancer in the universe, destroying all we hold dear little by little! We should have stopped them long ago, we had the power to stop them long ago. But we always sat on our hands and waited, and always they used that time to grow in strength until they were ready to fight us. We always let them have the first move, they fought every battle and every war when they wanted and on their terms. Well, let it be said, let it ring through the history of the galaxy for the next ten thousand years, that this pattern ends today! Today we shall stand up for ourselves, and strike them down” Sheppard’s jaw shook with emotion “and we shall make them pay for what they’ve done!” With that the communication terminated.

Kirk raised his hands and clapped slowly, solemnly. The bridge crew joined him, applause ringing through the cramped bridge of the Defiant. “Gentlemen” he said “the first target of our task force is the Draka refueling station at Narendra III. We await the Admiral’s order… and may the wind be at our backs.”

The last order was transmitted throughout the thousands of ships of the Combined Khitomer Fleet, and one by one they disappeared in flashes of rending quantum foam.
* * *

Typhonis 1 was aptly named. It was an ocean world, much larger than Earth, with crushing gravity and a thick, storm-tossed atmosphere. Great hurricanes billowed across its raging seas, gathering incredibly strength as they traversed the endless open oceans. It had been intended as no more than a refueling station for Draka military convoys. The Typhonis 1 station clung to a barren wave-battered rock like a barnacle; nothing more than a cluster of metal domes and an area of the low island that had been flattened and filled in with concrete to serve as a landing pad. The place was dismal and gloomy. The weak K class orange dwarf sun barely managed to penetrate the thick clouds and rain was constant, washing any trace of soil from the hostile crags of the island.

Janissary Trooper Puran Ameri had long since given up trying to keep the rainwater out of her face. The lookout tower was covered, so theoretically it should be dry, but the strong winds blew the raindrops in every direction, soaking everything. She tried as best she could to push the hood of her grey camouflage-pattern plastic mack in front of her face. Typhonis Station was pretty out of the way, not meriting a Drakensis presence, and the military had long since given up on trying to replace the windows of the watchtower which the storms kept blowing out anyway.

A light blinked on in the side of her console. She wiped the waterlogged radar screen with one freezing hand. Five shuttles inbound. That was very strange. Supply drops weren’t due for another three weeks. She opened her hood and lifted her soaked binoculars to her face. Her eyes widened as she adjusted the focus. The incoming craft had the sleek, needle-like form of fighters. And painted on their broad delta-wings was the blood and bone stripes and single star of the Alliance.

“Oh shit…” she muttered. She grabbed the mike and hit the button for base wide address. Her ampliphied voice blared out of Typhonis Station’s PA bullhorns.

WE HAVE SIX ALLIANCE FIGHTERS INBOUND REPEAT SIX ALLIANCE FIGHTERS INBOUND THIS IS NOT A DRILL. SIX ALLIANCE FIGHTERS INBOUND AT-UH-NINE O’CLOCK. WE’RE GETTING ATTACKED.

She began climbing down the ladder toward the armored domes below. She could hear the deep rumble of the fighters’ engines now. The waterlogged steel rungs were treacherously slippery, and as desperate as she was to get down somewhere more protected she didn’t dare move much faster than a crawl. In other parts of the base she could see Janissaries and hellhounds rushing to man weapons turrets.

The fighters passed overhead dropped what Ameri recognized to her horror as napalm bombs. The potent incendiaries exploded, showering her with burning synthetic petroleum jelly. The unfortunate Servus screamed in agony as she felt the flaming jelly eat at her. She could see the plastic overcoat melting into her sizzling, boiling flesh. The rain didn’t slow it down at all. The flames licked her hand and she screamed again and let go. Water splashed around her as she landed, but the napalm kept burning. She could feel her own flesh peeling back from the blackening bone. The pain was worse than anything she’d ever felt in the agony booth. She saw a hovering Marine transport pause above the base and power armored US Marines jump down onto the tarmac, their suits impervious to the napalm fires they waded through. She didn’t care. She just wished the fire would hurry up and burn her already, so she wouldn’t have to feel any more pain.
* * *

Not far from the arid world of Narendra III space ripped and tore and spat out a massive flotilla of Alliance battleships, spearheaded by the Liberty class USS Montana. Captain Kirk slid his Defiant smoothly into a loose formation designed to take advantage of the Alliance’s superior maneuverability.


Commander von Shrakenburg watched with concern as the sensor screens of Narendra station exploded in virulent blooms of hostile contacts. The Klingons had made occasional raids on border outposts using cloaked ships from time to time, but as far as he knew they’d never had the audacity to attack a heavily fortified Draka base. And these weren’t Klingon, they were Alliance, which was even weirder because everybody knew the Alliance had always been spineless pussies and always would be. Well, they had supposedly destroyed a garrison on some shithole planet, but von Shrakenburg knew that was nothing more than an excuse-probably an outright lie-made up so the government could deal with the little insects once and for. And von Shrakenburg had been very much looking forward to dealing with them. Although now that he was watching dozens of Alliance ships streak in he wasn’t so sure.

“They’re not even bothering to cloak” Chief Sergeant Senghor noted. “Boy they sure are cocky.”

“That’s OK, we’ve got a thing or two to teach them.” Von Shrakenburg smiled unpleasantly. “And I think I will enjoy teaching it. Launch all warships and fighters, raise shields, and arm weapons.”

“Yes Master. At once master” the Chief Sergeant said.


“Sir, the Snakes’ nest is launching fighters” Radar said.

“How many?” Commodore Halyard asked.

“Looks like about seventeen Spectres, fifteen Hellions, ten Hoplites, and five Allegiances.” Radar paused for a moment and added “the Spectres are launching their long-range missiles.”

“Have the Alabama hit them back.” Alabama was an Emancipator class cruiser; the Alliance’s main large missile ship. Aside from a few particle cannons most of its destructive power was tied up in its missile launchers.


Von Shrakenburg watched as the poison-emerald icon of the Alliance cruiser gave birth to dozens of lesser contacts which streaked across the void to strike at his own vessels. Two Spectres were mauled by its fire but survived. A Hellion was not so lucky; it went down under a devastating barrage of eight nuclear missiles and was reduced to floating space debris in short order.

“Tell the gunners to concentrate on the missile ship” he ordered.


Commodore Halyard watched with no great surprise as the Draka concentrated their fire on the Alabama. For entire minutes it continued to fight as city-destroying explosions clawed at its shield. Then finally the shields could take no more the generators overloaded and burned out. Alabama still had its armor but while that helped against plasma weapons and particle beams it might as well be made of paper as far as being hit with a nuclear weapon went. Sensing that its doom was imminent it ejaculated a huge spray of nuclear death before the last Snake missile homed in and blew it out of the sky.


“Missile ship destroyed Master” Radar said. “The other ships are starting to pick up the slack but they don’t have the firepower.”

“Good” von Shrakenburg declared. “Now assign priority target to their battlecruisers. One of them’s bound to be the command ship.”

“Yes Master.”


“Sir, the Georgia has been crippled” Radio reported. “No, make that it’s been destroyed…. We’ve lost the Alaska… They’re concentrating their fire on the cruisers, trying to pick off the command ships.”

No shit Halyard thought to himself as missile after missile slammed home against the shields of his ship, steadily battering them away.

“Tell the-“ that was as far as he got because that was the instant Commodore Halyard’s command ship was struck by four nukes simultaneously and reduced to little more than vapor.


“Sir, the Commodore’s ship has been destroyed!” Communications yelled. Kirk didn’t need to be told how bad that was. With all four of their major battlecruisers destroyed there was no clear replacement fleet commander left. He could see the formation start to fall into disarray as Draka missiles continued to stream into it.

“Put me on fleet channel” Kirk ordered. “This is Captain Robert Kirk of the Defiant. We’re being hacked up. Recommend we split up your formation, draw in, and dogfight. Take full advantage of our maneuverability advantage.”


The slow, unpleasant smile grew under von Shrakenburg’s moustache as he watched the Alliance formation fall into complete disarray. Pathetic. They were utterly broken, now it was just a matter of pounding them to dust. He would have preferred that they’d have at least a little more discipline so he could get a decent fight. Well, what could one expect from an inferior race after all?

He didn’t pay the slightest attention as the Alliance destroyers and frigates began to slide toward their Draka counterparts like dancers before a ball. Then the horror began.

Missiles let fly, exploding against the shields of the Draka with the force of miniature supernovae. Particle beams lashed out like whips, striking the Draka without mercy. They attempted to respond in kind, slashing their tormentors with missiles and particle beams and withering plasma, but they were too slow. The Alliance vessels danced around, cheerfully mocking their clumsy attempts at pursuit. Von Shrakenburg could only look on helplessly as friendly icon after friendly icon winked out until none were left and the Alliance ships closed around Narendra station like buzzing mosquitoes.

[Junghalli]

Azara Dax was slammed back in her chair by multiple gee-forces as her Wasp class fighter rocketed out of the bay of the Alliance carrier Nimitz. The Nimitz was beyond visual range in seconds. The Trill brought her fighter into a standard cruise formation with the rest of her wing. The solar system beyond her cockpit bubble was distractingly beautiful. An inviting blue-green world smeared with the white of clouds lay dead ahead. Behind it was a dark gas giant, lightening and auroras flickering in its night hemisphere like an artillery barrage, and a collection of the gas giant’s lesser moons. In the night hemisphere of the habitable moon she could pick out a few tiny twinkling stars: a Draka colony. This system had been part of the Romulan Empire at one time, but the Draka had nuked its major settlements in the Draka-Romulan War almost a century ago, and had since moved in and claimed the place as their own.

Dax kept her eye on her radar as the habitable moon grew ever larger in front of her. She wasn’t expecting to be challenged out in space, but it was a possibility. In space one-man fighters had no real advantage over capital ships and plenty of disadvantages. Their main strength lay in being able to transcend the two dimensional nature of a ground battle, and that didn’t apply in open space. The last true space-fighter to roll off the assembly lines had been the two-man Peregrines of the Dominion War, and they were useful counters to the Jem Hadar bugs only because Gamma Quadrant ships were ludicrously fragile and severely underarmed. What small armed aerospace craft were very useful for was going ahead of planetary invasion forces and taking out defense installations and other such targets for them.

The world filled her forward vision now. Dax could make out rivers, oceans, lakes, and other such minutia on its daylight side. The squadron rolled and banked towards the dark side. They were already starting to cut air. There was a rising whine, like stiff wind, which became steadily louder and louder as flames of superheated atmosphere began licking at every projecting surface on the Wasps and the much larger Hornet class bombers they were escorting. The landscape below was pitch dark, but the night-vision cameras of the Wasps showed it in perfect, albeit colorless detail. Dax was flying over a mix of marshland and semitropical forest. As the squadron headed north it gradually changed to temperate woodlands, which rose up in a low, eroded mountain chain rather like Earth’s Appalachians or Urals.

“This is Baker 7 I’m picking up multiple bogeys inbound at five o’clock” came the report over the radio link.

“Confirmed Baker 7” the Wing Commander said. “Split up and engage.”


Hellhound # 47,892,701 was steadily gaining on the enemy in his Eagle class fighter. They were still some distance away from the main settlement of Drakesland Colony, so he still had time to intercept them. Good. The Masters must be protected at all costs. That command had been inscribed into his very DNA.

The well organized dots on his radar screen began to split up and scatter. That was standard doctrine for Alliance fighters. Their maneuverability was their greatest advantage, and keeping formation would only squander it.

The voice of Axis Kast came over the radio link. Hellhound # 47,892,701 felt cool confidence flood over him as the Draka gave him his orders. The hellhounds were genetically modified to only be truly happy when following orders.

“Go after the larger targets, they’ll be the bombers. Ignore the fighters unless engaged.”

“Yes Master!” Hellhound # 47,892,701 growled as the formation broke up and closed in.


Jack Cruise spotted three Eagles gaining on one of the Hornets. “This is Baker 6, Stinger 2 I see three bogeys coming up behind you.”

“Baker 6, Baker 4, and Baker 2, engage those Draka” the Wing Commander ordered.

“With pleasure sir” Cruise said as he throttled back on the scramjets, allowing his fighter to swing back behind the approaching Eagle. The Eagle saw him and tried to bank, but it was too slow. Cruise easily caught up with it and gave it a missile up its tail-pipe courtesy of Uncle Sam.


Hellhound # 69,698,964 roared as the Alliance missile slammed into his unshielded fighter. It sheared off a wing and sent it tumbling down toward the dark landscape below. The hellhound tried to stabilize it but it was useless. At the end he drew comfort from having died serving the Masters.


Vargez watched nervously as the Eagle continued to creep up on his Hornet. The Hornet was a big, heavily armed craft with a crew of six, but it wasn’t designed for fighting. It was slow and its weapons were designed to hit targets that were more-or-less stationary. Not to mention that it was completely without cover from above.

A Wasp just returned from killing one Snake was trying to engage this one, but the pilot was determined. He was staying right and true on the Hornet’s tail.


Jack Cruise tried to dislodge the Eagle from its pursuit of the slow, clumsy Hornet bomber but so far he was failing. Whoever was flying that thing wasn’t half-bad, he had to admit. He was using the Eagle’s rear plasma guns to keep Cruise off his tail, but otherwise staying on target. Cruise looked for an opening but couldn’t find it. The other pilot kept escaping his every attempt at a weapons lock, despite the fact that his airplane moved like a crippled pigeon compared to the Wasp. Cruise could only watch in dismay as he let loose with his disruptor cannon, cutting the Hornet into two flaming halves which tumbled down to the night-shrouded forests below.


Hellhound # 47,892,701 howled in triumph as the Alliance bomber was carved in twain by his disruptor cannon. Unfortunately for him the designers of the Eagle had chosen to mount the disruptor cannon directly above the cockpit, which was probably not the best of choices (then again, what did one expect of a fighter designed to be flown by infinitely replaceable hellhound transgenes?). He was momentarily blinded, which was just enough time for the Alliance fighter which had been trying to shake him off the bomber to wallop his Eagle with two missiles, reducing it to a flying lump of scorched scrap metal.

He never got to see his revenge. Just as his body was being vaporized by the explosion his wingmate tore into Cruise’s fighter with his wing-mounted grav-guns. As Cruise struggled to stabilize his damaged fighter this was followed up by a generous helping of plasma hot enough to melt steel like butter.


Axis Kast watched as the Alliance fighter swooped down on his lumbering Cobra, grav-guns blazing. Bullets as wide around as quarters, expelled from their barrels at supersonic speeds, flew toward his fighter and then bounced harmlessly off its shields. The Cobra might not be fast but it had something the Eagles didn’t: a small shield generator. After all, the Draka weren’t going to send one of their own out in a fighter that could get downed by one shot with a missile, were they?

Kast accelerated, allowing the Alliance fighter to pass just behind him and giving his hellhound tail gunner a good crack at it. His instruments confirmed that the hellhound had done his job well: the fighter was crashing in flames, mauled to death by the powerful rear disruptors of the Cobra.

He noted that one of the bombers had broken formation and was now flying away at high speed, its wing guarded by a single fighter. He took off after it, pausing to destroy another Alliance fighter with a missile.


The Hornet was getting close to its objective. Azara Dax knew that because the night cameras of the Wasp showed the forest below to be periodically interrupted by the cleared land, usually with a large mansion rising from the center of it. Plantations. It reminded her of descriptions of the old American south. They weren’t the target though. Cleaning up the planet would be the Army’s job. Her target was a series of Draka defense installations, the closest of which was still a little ways away.

“Baker 6, we’re reading a bogey inbound at eight o’clock over” came the transmission.

“Copy that Hornet 3, I’m on it” she replied. The blip on her radar was too big to be an Eagle, and it was moving too slow. She hit it with a focused radar scan and waited for the Wasp’s CPU to process the return.

“Oh shit…” she muttered to herself. It was a Cobra: the aerospace fighters the Snakes themselves flew around in when commanding their squadrons. That meant it was armed to the teeth and worse, shielded. She sighed. Why couldn’t the Alliance have sent some Defenders on this mission? A Defender was like a Wasp, but better armed and with a shield. Of course, they were also rather new, and therefore not very common.

“Hornet 3 this is Baker 6, I’m breaking off.” She eased up on the scramjets, letting the Snake slowly close the distance with her.


Axis Kast pushed down on the joystick and heard the Cobra’s scramjets laboring beneath him. The Cobra was big and heavy and not terribly aerodynamic. It looked like a sort of flying diamond, its fat, stubby wings full of fuel and weaponry. But it was tough, almost as tough as a Klingon fighter, and no Draka was going to risk his long and valuable life in one of the tin death traps they expected their expendable servants to fight in.

He watched the Alliance fighter grow closer in his radar screen. He wondered whether he should pause to destroy it or go on and finish off the bomber. The question was answered for him as the Alliance fighter banked towards him at a speed he couldn’t possibly hope to evade, grav-guns blazing. Axis Kast put the Cobra in a slow upward rise, trying to get above the enemies line of attack. But the Wasp was much too maneuverable for that and rose under him, savaging the Cobra’s underside with particle beam fire. Kast frowned as he tried to dip and roll his way behind his attacker.


Dax overshot the Cobra and whipped her fighter back around, hitting it again with a missile as it tried futilely to get in behind her. The problem was that though she could fly rings around the Snake all he had to do was get lucky once and she was toast. He was burning the space around him plasma and particle beams, and she’d have to be fast to keep him from getting a missile lock. She twisted back around and sent another missile his way. Again it exploded against his shields, but she knew there was no way his shielding system could take much more abuse. She followed it up by a flyby with a thorough pelting with her grav-guns. The Cobra slashed the side her Wasp’s fuselage with a plasma gun, leaving a long and ugly burn mark where it had struck but no real damage. Still, it was close, real close. If he’d hit her in the middle of the plane instead of just grazing it she’d have been literally fried.

Her scramjets screamed in protest as she did a whiplash turn and fired on the Cobra with all her weapons simultaneously. It worked. The Cobra’s shields were weakened just enough that some of the blast force of one missile got through and sheared off one of its fat, thick wings. And began to fall towards the ground, trailing smoke.


Axis Kast was in a panic as his fighter lost altitude. Virtually a third of the fighter’s body had been sheared off and there was no question whatsoever of stabilizing it. His gloved hand shattered a glass panel on the side of his seat and grasped the lever marked EMERGENCY EJECT. The tail gunner had no such lever in his compartment, but of course he was just a hellhound and therefore easily replaceable. He would die with his plane.

A puff of smoke wafted up from the ejection system, but otherwise nothing happened. It was toasted.

Axis Kast’s plaintive scream continued all the way down to the ground, where it finally stopped as his plane exploded down to earth in a shower of sparks and fire.
* * *

Von Shrakenburg was marched down the hallways of Narendra station, his arms in the air and the business end of a US Marine’s particle gun jammed into his ribcage. The place was a mess, the walls charred with burn-marks from the long, grueling firefight that had finally ended in the capture of the Narendra system by the Alliance. Early in the battle von Shrakenburg had initiated an explosive air purge of the entire station except for the command module, hoping that this would at least slow down the Alliance advance. But of course the power armor the Marines used allowed them to survive in harsh conditions, including the vacuum of space, for short periods of time. The result was that a large number of Janissaries had been killed as the air was sucked out of the station, but other than that the fight had continued as before, albeit in eerie silence. The Alliance had now restored normal life-support and would no doubt use this base as a staging point to strike deeper into the Dominate.

“Come on Snake” the Marine hissed, his voice magnified through the speakers of his power armor. Von Shrakenburg couldn’t believe he’d allowed himself to be captured alive. His family would be ruined if this was ever found out.

[1123581321]

This fanfic is awesome, especially when the Draka get curb stomped. Son in that role...

GET BACK TO THE BORG KICKING DRAKA ASS!!!!!

[darthdavid]

My god this rocks.

[speaker-to-trolls]

The question is, will god-Janeway intervene to save her rabid little children?.

[Junghalli]

Governor Grudermann’s perscomp called softly for his attention, the Chinese wind chime tone he had selected drifting through the sultry, stagnant air of his dark palatial quarters. The governor, who was busy fucking one of his personal attendants, had better things to do than answer it. After a few moments it sounded again. This pattern continued for several minutes before the governor interrupted his job to slam down the mute command. Whoever was calling him at this hour would be in for a nice long vacation in the agony booth. He cursed under his breath for a moment and then returned to his bitch.


“The Governor won’t answer Master Sergeant” the Romulan serf technician said hesitantly. The command center wasn’t air conditioned and sweat was streaming down his forehead. That wasn’t the only reason he was sweating of course. The Janissary Master Sergeant leaning over his shoulder could cause him pain now, but the Governor could cause him a good deal more pain later. It was a terrible quandary.

Master Sergeant Jono groaned to himself. “Fucking typical. The Romii Reserve Fleet just got wiped out and the fat slug won’t answer! I’ll bet he’s too busy fucking one of his Romulan serf bitches!” The other Janissaries and Romulan serf technicians looked up sharply at this open display of contempt for the Governor. Even the higher serfs took their lives in their hands when they said something bad about the Draka, and it was a measure of the desperation of the hour that Jono’s self-control had slipped so far. Like many conscripts from the Dominate’s extrasolar territories Jono secretly hated his Draka masters with a passion. He had been orphaned in the terrible days of the fall of the Talarian Steadhold, and he had seen with his own eyes the horrible atrocities the Draka monsters perpetrated on those they conquered, growing up in the slave-pens of Tellaria. But he was also a great survivor, and he knew when to keep his mouth shut. But his survival looked rather dubious at this point anyway, with a huge armada of Klingon warships gathering above Romii like hunting raptors. Already Klingon fighters were sweeping over the planet, conducting surgical strikes against critical defense installations. Jono had done his best to warn the PDF forces scattered around Romii of the onrushing Klingon horde, but he needed a Draka’s clearance to authorize a planetary mobilization or give any real orders. And the only Draka on the planet was that lazy dickheaded excuse for a Governor.

“Raise him again!” Jono snapped. “This is a crisis here!”

“Yes Master Sergeant” the Romulan serf said helplessly as he called the Governor again.
* * *

Missiles rose into the still, fragrant air of Romii’s night. Kang could see that at least somebody on this planet seemed to be on top of things. After the victorious Klingons had blasted the Draka fleet the response from the planetside installations had been… disorganized. It was almost as if the PDF’s C&C had been wiped out. But the attack on the Governor’s Palace wasn’t due to take place until the warriors of the Empire began beaming down in massive numbers. He was forced to conclude that whoever was in charge down there was quite simply incompetent. This didn’t displease him, for it would mean that the planet could be cleansed of the foul Draka presence that much more easily, but nevertheless his feelings were mixed. As one who aspired to the honorable path of the warrior Kang felt a kind of disgust at the feeble resistance he was meeting. This wasn’t a battle; this was turning out to be little more than a simple extermination. He’d always heard that the Draka, vile as they were, were supposed to be great warriors, perhaps almost as good as the Klingons themselves. Apparently this was a myth.

“I see somebody’s finally managed to figure out they’re being attacked” Squadron Leader Worf growled over the radio. “Bombardiers: blast him! quapla!”

“Quapla!” the pilots of the huge Kahless class bombers seconded as the dived low to strafe the missile base. Antiaircraft particle beams stabbed the night like tight searchlights, but the bombers clubbed them out of existence with strikes from the heavy disruptor turrets mounted on their bellies and then proceeded to annihilate the subterranean missile silo itself with bunker-busting bombs. Just for good measure they swooped low over the hellhound’s barracks and burned them with disruptors, leaving the fires to smolder in the night to the accompaniment of the agonized howls of hellhounds as they were burned alive within.


Hellhound # 7,231,408 flew his Viper low to the ground to avoid detection by Klingon radar, almost skimming the rooftops of the miserable serf compounds of the Romulan laborers as he went. As soon as he spotted the Klingon raiding party on radar his squadron began climbing to meet them. He was a simpleminded creature, intent only on his own particular task, so of course it didn’t occur to him to wonder at the sluggish, disorganized response of the PDF. Neither did he appreciate the foresight and bravery of Janissary Master Sergeant Indhira, who had gone against the direct orders of her masters, defied her own genetic conditioning, and signed her own death warrant in the unlikely event anyone should survive this fiasco to do what had to be done and mount a counterattack, meager and ultimately futile as it might be, against the Klingon invaders.

Hellhound # 7,231,408 signaled his tail gunner to beware of enemies sneaking up behind, and launched his viper toward the enemy squadron as fast as its scramjets could go.


Kang spotted the Draka fighter rising behind him and split off formation, allowing the engines of his fighter to idle so that he could slip behind it. The Bloodletter class fighter he flew was a typical product of Klingon weapons engineering. Like almost all aerospace fighters and bombers of the Klingon Empire it was a single seat fighter, its design placing individual skill over teamwork. It was huge, burdened with heavy armor and even more weaponry. On scramjets alone it was never have flown. Most of the work of keeping it aloft in gravity fell to an antigrav field generator. The technology had originally been developed by an Alliance race that had used it to construct a floating city far above the toxic mists and broiling heat of their homeworld’s surface. As a warrior race the Klingons had found better uses for it.

The Viper launched hit his fighter with a plasma burst, but the Bloodletter’s thick armor was ideally suited for absorbing such assaults. It left little more than an unsightly burn mark. Kang rolled behind the enemy fighter and returned the favor with a missile, knocking it out of the air. Two more Draka fighter attacked him, and he destroyed each in turn. He took moderate damage to his own fighter in the process and most of his starboard weapons were knocked out by a disruptor hit, but the sturdy construction favored by the Empire paid off. None of the hits cut far enough into the armor to blow the fuel tanks, reactor, or anything else vital. Moving as quickly as his damaged engines would allow (the left scramjet had been taken out and he now had some problems maneuvering) he climbed back into the upper atmosphere and toward the point where his carrier lay cloaked just behind Romii’s inner moon.
* * *

Sela held her small son close to her as the Klingon artillery bombardment shook the crowded, miserable serf compound that she shared with the rest of the night-shift workers of Ingollfson Industries fuel cell factory. The crowd milled miserably around her in the hot night, mostly having decided that being outside in the dirt courtyard was considerably safer than being in one of the rickety corrugated metal shacks that passed for their living quarters. Hellhounds stood guard around the nervous crowd, grav-guns cradled in their arms and truncheons dangling prominently from their belts. Occasionally a whip would crack when somebody got too far out of line. Sela was pressed against the wooden pole that the overseers tied disobedient serfs to for punishment, almost unable to move in the near-panicked crowd. Fires were burning unchecked through the factory and surrounding compounds, and they were getting disturbingly large. Sela knew very well that if the flames should spread into her compound the Draka wouldn’t lift a finger to save anyone, wouldn’t even bother to unlock the gates. She could hear the sounds of gunfire getting steadily closer and closer. Her son squirmed into her, terrified, and she supposed he had a right to be. There was some hope among the serfs; hope that the Draka were finally being thrown off their world, but most of them were realistic. In all likelihood they would pass from one brutal conqueror to another. And that was if the Klingons won and if they didn’t all die in the next few hours. Klingons were not known for taking prisoners or asking questions.

A Draka tank lumbered past the chained gates of the serf compound, the vicious red dragon of the Dominate prominently emblazoned across its flank. Gasps and groans rose from the crowd as an orange bar of disruptor fire touched it and it exploded. Hideous inhuman screams were heard as its hellhound crew was burned alive within. Next several power armored hellhounds walked backward past the gate, obviously beating a fighting retreat, particle rifles and plasma pistols snapping as the went. One of them was struck by a disruptor beam in the shoulder and went down in the dry dust churned by the shuffling feet of thousands of laborers being marched to and from their shifts. Sela heard the lumbering sound of a tank, but it didn’t sound like a Draka tank. The familiar clanking of treads was absent. Instead there was a rumble of great wheels in motion, and the engine was choppier, but with a deep growl that seemed to tell of great horsepower. The monster came into view and several men recoiled at the sight. It was enormous, twice as high as a Draka tank, supported by six huge wheels with thick tires. The Draka tanks had seemed heavily armed to the Sela, and certainly to the light infantry that had been the only thing to oppose them as they tore across the Romulan Empire they had been terrifying nightmares, but they looked almost pathetically underarmed compared to this beast. There were huge weapons barrels mounted on its sides, big box missile launchers on its top, and it was crowned by not one but two disruptor turrets. It looked almost as if the designer had simply tacked on weaponry wherever it could be fitted, and from what Sela knew of the Klingons that might very well be exactly the case. It seemed far more heavily armed and sturdier than its Draka counterparts, and it was the color of ancient, well-oiled bronze. Altogether it seemed to ooze power and solidity. The Klingon triskelion was emblazoned prominently upon its front. The thing didn’t even bother to blow down the gate. It simply crashed right through it, taking out huge chunks of concrete guardwall the wall along with it. Dents popped on its armor as the self-repairing polymorphic alloy snapped back into shape. The front ranks of disheveled, jumpsuit-clad serfs backed away from it lest they be run over. Power armored Klingons emerged from behind the cover of the shattered wall and made quick work of the remaining hellhounds. In the process one of their beams missed and sliced into a Romulan woman’s leg, exploding her kneecap like a grenade and sending bits of bone exploding outward and digging themselves into the flesh of those closest to her.

As several men bent down to tend to the stricken woman a figure jumped atop the tank to address the crowd. Sela assumed it was the Klingon commander, but strangely enough he seemed to be wearing Draka power armor. Well, it was almost Draka power armor. The dragon had been painted over, and in its place was the metallic eagle of the old Romulan Empire. The man pushed a button on his suit and his helmet retreated into the armor’s collar. He was Romulan. He looked young, and his eyes had a strange fire in them.

“Fellow Romulans!” he shouted. His voice had great fervor and carried easily across the slave compound. “The day of our freedom is at hand! The Klingons have come to restore to us our freedom! Today, the Romulan Star Empire will be reborn! Who will take up arms and help us throw off the yoke of the Draka beasts and their revolting transgenic minions? Who will help us take back our worlds, our lives, our Empire?”

Sela felt hope rise within her, but also doubt. Could it really be true? Would the Klingons actually allow them to take back empire? It seemed much too good to be the truth.

She saw Traklamak step forward. He was an angry young man, continuously chafing against the hardships and restrictions of life under the Draka. “I will join you!” he proclaimed. “What can I do?”

“Fight!” the man on the tank said. “And take back what is yours!” With that he jumped down and approached one of the dead hellhounds. He bent down and pushed a button on the hellhound’s belt buckle. The polymorphous power armor retreated from its corpse with a great deal of clanking and buckling, finally drawing itself back into its backpack. The man undid the straps of the backpack and put it on Traklamak, securing it to him. Then he pressed the same button. The polymorphic armor sprang out again, automatically adjusting to the new wearer’s body as it reformed, and Traklamak took the particle rifle and plasma pistol in his hands and stood resplended in his mighty new suit of armor. A Klingon came forward with what appeared to be some kind of aerosol cans. The man took them and sprayed over the dragon of the Dominate, burying it in deep Romulan green and then deftly painting the Imperial eagle in its place.

“Welcome to the Free Romulan Army” the man said as he clapped Traklamak on his armored back. “Who else? Who else will claim their rightful vengeance upon the vile Draka tonight?”

In the minds of hundreds of Romulans in the dirt pit of the serf compounds memories stirred. Memories of long thankless toil without reward. Memories of cold and exposure and hunger. Memories of children ripped from their parents arms by uncaring hellhound guards and families capriciously broken up. Memories of whipping and agony booths, of friends and loved ones dead and wives and daughters raped. Memories of all the suffering the Draka had inflicted upon them. And with those memories came the desire, always just beneath the surface, to strike back, to return that suffering to their oppressors a hundred fold if possible, to avenge their shattered empire and all the horrors the Dominate had wrought upon it.

Their eagerness could not be restrained. When they had no more weapons to scavenge from the dead hellhounds they grabbed pitchforks and kitchen knifes and heavy tools and anything else they could get their hands and set out with one goal in mind: to find every last Draka on the planet and every last sniveling Servus and every last brutish Janissary conscript and every last disgusting hellhound and kill them, slowly and painfully if that was at all possible.
* * *

“Master Sergeant, the Governor still does not respond” the Romulan serf technician said.

Jono watched and listened in abject horror as Romii’s PDF was methodically taken apart by the Klingon invaders. Much of the planetary defense system was destroyed, and that which remained was now in Klingon hands. If reinforcements arrived from offworld they would be fired upon by the Draka’s own dirtside defense systems. One by one the military bases and garrisons that dotted Romii’s landscape were coming under heavy assault. Forbidden from taking any action without the government’s authorization they were unable to do anything but defend themselves from direct attack. Without the ability to offer up a coordinated response garrison after garrison was swamped with crushing waves of Klingon infantry and cavalry, supported by Klingon scramjet bombers which now ruled the skies unchallenged. Heavy jamming was making communications difficult, and it was only getting worse as the invaders seized radio transmitters and power stations and shut them down. Here and there a few Janissary commanders managed to organize small counterattacks, but most were simply crushed. Those that ran for their lives were quickly fallen upon by roving gangs of maddened Romulan serfs who the Klingons had set free to rampage through the countryside.

“Goddamit that incompetent nimrod will get us killed!” Jono raged. “Put me on a direct line to his perscomp and let me talk to him! I don’t give a flying fuck about interrupting his beauty sleep!”

The Romulan serf tried to decide whether or not it was better to risk the Governor’s wrath or his Master Sergeant’s. In the end the threat of immediate pain trumped that of delayed pain, and he only hoped that the Governor’s anger would fall upon Jono’s shoulders instead of his own. He keyed the necessary commands nodded. “You’re on.”

“Governor Grudermann” Jono said. “I’m sorry to bother you this late at night, but we’re-“

“I ordered no interruptions!” the Governor roared from the other end. “Whatever it is go deal with it, can’t you people think for yourselves? I’ve got other things to do, but I’ll deal with this interruption later, you can be sure of that!”

As if you’d actually want us to think for ourselves! Jono thought to himself. Aloud he said “I’m sorry Governor, but we need your authorization to-“

Before he could finish the lights went out.

“What the fik?” somebody shouted into the darkness. A moment later the lights were restored.

“The Klingons just took the city power plant” a Romulan serf technician reported. “We’re running off on-site generators now.”

“The city power plant?” Jono’s eyes widened with shock. “That’s less than three kilometers from where we are!” As if to underscore his words the building shook with what was undoubtedly a Klingon artillery shot.

“Raise the theatre shields!” Jono screamed. “Get them up now!”

“Theatre shields are up” a female Romulan serf technician said. As she spoke the building shook from the impacts of artillery shells, but now they were muffled and the vibrations were not as violent. “Theatre shields are holding.”

“Put me on with the Governor again” Jono said.

“Yes Master Sergeant” the serf technician said.

“What the fik is going on?” the Governor demanded from the other end. Jono thought he heard a cry of fright, and it sounded feminine. So he had been right about just what the Governor’s “important business” had been. He felt sick. Thousands of perfectly good men and women had just perished because the Governor was too busy porking his personal bitch and the Draka were too paranoid about revolt to allow anyone else to take charge when his leadership was disastrously inadequate. “You had better had a damn good explanation serf, or I’m going to make you curse the day your father fucked your mother!”

“That, Governor, was a Klingon artillery barrage. As we speak our defense fleet has been annihilated by Klingon attack. Governor, I need your authorization to organize a defense, regulations state that any Class 4 or above command cannot be given by a Janissary. I just hope it isn’t too late, because the ridgeheads have had the run of the planet while we were trying to reach and at this point they’re overrunning the provincial capitol. Those booms you felt was their artillery bombarding the building that you and I are in!”


General Kren had never expected the taking of a Draka world to be so easy. From everything he’d read about the Draka they were supposed to be mighty warriors, but apparently that was all propaganda. Oh, their soldiers fought well enough on the scales of individuals and squads. Hellhounds were certainly not adversaries to be sneezed at. But it was almost as if they had never heard of the concept of a managed response. They never rushed reinforcements to threatened areas or bases under siege, never counterattacked, apparently never did anything at all until they came under direct assault. There was no strategy, no real tactics; they simply waited passively for the Klingons to come to them. The Empire’s invasion force had shattered their resistance with ease, applying overwhelming force to their garrisons one by one and watching with amazement as one by one they all collapsed under superior firepower and weight of numbers. The total hellhound garrisons of this planet outnumbered the Imperial invasion force by a significant margin, but the Klingons were finding themselves at a dramatic numerical advantage in every engagement. Imperial plans for the liberation of Romii called for a campaign that might easily stretch into months. Instead the Draka occupying force had been effectively routed in a matter of hours. The planetary capital itself was already falling into Klingon hands! All that remained was to take the Drakan C&C and Kren’s triumph would be complete. Oh to be sure there would still be the mopping up operations, but for all practical purposes the Dominate’s hold on the world would be utterly broken. The only thing that bothered Kren was the idiot “Free Romulan Units”. Completely untrained rabble with nothing more than their sheer hatred for the Draka driving them, equipped with weapons scavenged from Klingon and hellhound casualties and sometimes not even that. Many of them carried no more than clubs or kitchen knives. They simply threw themselves at Drakan positions and bases like maddened insects, usually being slaughtered like livestock without making any significant headway. Even the ones with decent weapons were totally untrained in their use and were almost as much of a nuisance to their Klingon allies as they were to the enemy. Kren would have strong words for whatever moron thought up the whole hairbrained scheme.

General Kren was busily setting up his troops and artillery pieces below the high hill upon which the Draka governor’s palace and military headquarters was located. Fighting was still raging over many parts of the city, but the Draka there were being steadily exterminated. It would take a good deal of messy house-to-house fighting, but their ultimate defeat there was basically inevitable. They had already been broken up into a splatter of micro-kessels unable to reinforce or support each other, and it was just a matter of smoking or digging them out. No, the real battle was to be fought here.

The Governor’s Palace occupied a good commanding position atop the highest hill overlooking the valley over which the provincial capital sprawled. The building was a gaudy thing constructed of marble wrenched from the nearby quarries and cut into ostentatious frescoes and decorations by the backbreaking labor of armies of Romulan serfs. Like most Draka centers of power it was built in kitschy imitation of the finest architecture of the Hellenic era and looked like some sort of grotesque hybrid between the Parthenon and an antebellum plantation mansion. The heavy artillery being brought to bear would tear the structure itself apart like wet tissue paper, but shimmering above it was the barely visible curtain of a multi-terawatt forcefield. It was surrounded by a perimeter of artillery pieces and particle turrets. The hillside had been cleared of trees to deny an advancing enemy of any cover. Kren would be forced to set up his artillery pieces in the serf shantytown at the base of the hill. He brought up as many tanks and armored vehicles as he could spare from the cleansing of the city. His men would advance behind them, using them as cover. Romii’s days were short, and it was almost morning. Soon a new day would dawn. Kren felt excited, heady with his forthcoming triumph. A part of him longer for the days when all this hadn’t been necessary, when all a Klingon needed was his bat’leth and a good disruptor at his side, but he knew those days would never come again. Modern weapons were sufficiently powerful that a soldier without power armor, fire support, and the backing of heavy armor was simply dead meat on the battlefield. The Romulans had learned that lesson quite painfully when the Draka had invaded their worlds before Kren was born, and their light infantrymen had been slaughtered like targs.

Already Kren had his heavy artillery set up and the artillerymen were doing test fires against the Governor’s Palace. Its shields absorbed the blasts easily for now, but they couldn’t last forever. A few hours or at most a day of heavy sustained blasting and they’d be in tatters, if the fuel supply for the base’s internal fusion reactor didn’t run out first.

Kren saw his Commandant of Artillery, Koloth, approaching. The Commandant gave him a Klingon salute-a gesture that consisted of rapping a clenched fist against the chest piece of his power armor. “The artillery tests out perfectly. A half a day at most and it’ll batter through the palace’s shields.”

“Too long” Kren said. “That thing’s an eyesore, I want it down as quickly as possible.” Also, his victory-and his battle report-would be all the more glorious if he could effectively break the spine of the Draka war machine within a single night. “Have the tanks move up to take forward positions. Go tell Kor that I want every man he can spare for this breakthrough.”

“He won’t be pleased” Koloth noted. “What about flushing out the Draka remnants in the city?”

Kren thought it over for a moment and said “tell him to keep a few of his best units to attack dug-in positions and let the Free Romulan Units handle the rest. Since we’re stuck with them anyway we might as well make use of them, they should be able to handle rounding up some stragglers.”

“Yes sir” Koloth said. “Quapla!”

“Quapla!” Kren agreed.


Dawn had risen over Romii, and the Klingon attack continued without relent or reprieve. The shields shuttered and stuttered and almost buckled beneath the continuous pounding of enemy artillery. The day would be hot and still, and Jono would probably have found the cool morning wonderful were it not for the fact that he was busy thinking about how he was going to repel the next Klingon advance. The ridgeheads were lining up their tanks in the shantytown that sprawled over the bottom of the hill, getting ready for another push. Jono knew he was doomed. There would be no escape. Even the orbital flyers in the base’s hangar could not save him. If he tried to make a run for it he’d just be shot down by Klingon antiaircraft batteries, or a fighter would take him down as he tried to break atmosphere. At the very best an orbiting warship might have to momentarily inconvenience itself to obliterate him. The situation was only getting worse and worse as the Klingons mopped up the last pockets of resistance on other parts of the planet and had more and more men to spare for the engagement. The jamming was so heavy that the radio in Jono’s power armor was virtually useless, and he was forced to command his forces by the time-honored methods of gesturing and shouting at them.

“This is your fault!” Governor Grudermann screamed at him, his chubby face red with anger. He was almost pissing himself in terror, and he covered it up with hot rage. It was easy to lash out at a serf who was forbidden from defending himself on pain of the agony booth or worse. It made him feel powerful again. Certainly, it was much more satisfying than contemplating the rampaging Klingon hoards outside, eager to rip him limb from limb when they got their hands on him. “You were the one who just sat there and twiddled your thumbs while the damn ridgeheads overran the whole planet!” he had, of course, conveniently forgotten that Jono’s hands had been firmly bound by the Draka’s own paranoid protocol. “Well, I’ll see that you pay for your incompetence when this is all over! Now get out there and kill those boneheads serf!”

With a mighty effort of will Jono stifled the sigh that struggled to come out ahead of his sentence. “Respectfully, it’s not that easy Master. The Klingons are bringing in reinforcements from all over the planet, and I’d say by now they probably outnumber us a good six or seven to one at the very least. The second that shield fails this building is going to be ripped up like cardboard by the arty-“

“More incompetence!” the Governor railed. “You’ll pay for this serf! When this is all over I’ll have you flayed alive and your whole family and everyone who’s ever met you impaled on a rusty spike! Now get out there and do your job, trust me if you’re killed it’ll be downright merciful compared to what I’ve got in store for you back home!”

Jono could take it no longer. “No” he said.

“What did you say, serf!” Grudermann sputtered, his fat jaw shaking with outrage and spittle flying into the visor of Jono’s helmet.

“I SAID NO!” The sound of Jono’s voice, ampliphied into god-like force by his suits speakers, made the Governor abruptly realize that he was talking to a serf who also happened to be a trained warrior in a power armor suit equipped with weapons that could savage cities. It was easy to forget things like that when ones commands were backed by the full might of the Dominate, but it was starting to dawn on Grudermann that this was no longer true.

“Don’t you get it?” Jono said. “You won’t be going back home! Neither will I, not will any of us. We’re screwed Governor. If we try to get off the planet we’ll be shot down. If we try to run away the Klingons will be on us like a ton of bricks, and if by some miracle we can get away from them how long do you think we’d last out there, surrounded by Romulan serfs, excuse me-former Romulan serfs who want nothing more than to rip out our guts and feed them to crows, preferably while we’re still alive? You’ve lost, and there’s nothing you can do about it!” So saying he began punching commands into his power armor. “This suit is powered by a mini fusion reactor, and I’m setting it to deliberate catastrophic overload. When it blows it’s going to vaporize half the city.”

“But-but-you can’t do that!” Grudermann stammered. “I’ll have no chance to escape-I’ll-I’ll be killed!”

“That’s right” Jono said. “You’re going to die for the Dominate. Just like everyone else here.”

Grudermann had gone white as a sheet, save for three streaks of livid red across his cheeks and below his bald head. His fat lips worked silently in shock and outrage. He wasn’t supposed to have to die for his country: that was what Janissaries were there for. It was an outrage!

“You-you-I’m your master, you can’t do this to me!” he shrieked. “Guards, stop that-“

Jono squeezed Grudermann’s head in the fist of his power armor, choking off his command before he could finish it. “As a matter of fact Grudermann, I can do this to you. I can do it because right now I have the power and you don’t. Surely a Draka can appreciate that now, can’t you? Also I’m doing because it’s what must be done, and because it’s what you deserve. Your incompetence has doomed good men to their death. Men who wanted no part in your Dominate but had no choice. Men who died protecting the very state that had oppressed them, that had taken away their freedom, murdered their families, and destroyed their homes and their worlds. That’s right you fat slug, your incompetence, not mine. They died because you were probably preoccupied fucking your personal bitch knowing you, you disgusting excuse for a man. You make me ill.” Grudermann tried to claw his way of Jono’s grasp, but even his augmented strength was no match for the power armor’s hydraulics. The Talarian Master Sergeant shook his head. “No, you don’t deserve such an honorable death. So I’m going to give you death you do deserve. A death that is utterly pathetic and insignificant.” He tightened his grip on the mewling Governor’s head. Only the slightest pressure was needed; the armor’s mechanical muscles did the rest. Governor Grudermann’s skull collapsed with a crunch like an eggshell being stepped on. The Talarian dropped the Draka’s now headless body, still twitching, its genetically superior physiology keeping it alive. He walked slowly towards a Security console, pushing the attending Servus aside and entering new orders into the base’s security system, smearing the console with the late Governor’s blood, hair, skin, and brain matter as he did so. He shut down the shields protecting the Governor’s palace. As soon as they dropped the lights died and the building shook as Klingon artillery tore apart portions of the now naked stone walls. Then the Klingon tanks charged up the hill, and behind them came power armored Klingon soldiers.

Jono stepped back, took his particle rifle in his hands, upped its power to maximum, and blasted the exterior wall of the control room. The rifle chewed easily through the soft marble, sending dust and rock chunks flying, and within seconds there was a hole in the wall big enough to roll a tank through.

“You may go” he told the Romulan technicians. “Keep your hands up as you walk out. If you’re lucky the Klingons will consider you freed serfs instead of the enemy.”

Within seconds the room was nearly empty. Only the Servus Janissaries and a few alien conscripts remained. They knew there would be no chance of mercy for them. The Klingons were not known for taking prisoners.

Jono did not have long to wait. Within minutes an ungainly, ridiculously overarmed Klingon tank crashed through the wall of the command chamber, extending the hole the Talarian Master Sergeant had made by a good meter or two in the process. A squad of Klingon soldiers followed behind it. A Kling in a fancier suit than the rest, with the Imperial triskelion prominently emblazoned across its chest, approached him. He was obviously the Squad Commander. Cradled in his arms was an obscenely oversized grav-gun. In the condition his battlesuit was in Jono knew that if he got shot with that it would almost certainly be fatal.

“Where is the Governor?” the alien growled, the universal translator built into this battlesuit automatically changing his words from his guttural native language to the Drakian dialect of English.

“Right there.” Jono pointed at the still twitching headless corpse on the floor.

“What happened?” the Klingon Squad Commander demanded.

“I killed him” Jono explained, spreading his gory hands so the alien Squad Commander could see them. “And you’re next.”

“Are trying to be funny?” the Klingon asked.

“Not at all.” There was already a rising whine issuing from the fusion backpack of the Janissary Master Sergeant’s suit. The Klingon raised a thick eyebrow, trying to figure out what he was hearing. It was, of course, the sound of a backpack fusion reactor being force-fed all its fuel at once and allowed to cataclysmically overload. The burning plasma, under tremendous pressure, burst through the reactor casing and into the open air of Romii. Gas hotter than the core of a sun mingled with the planet’s atmosphere. It was not an explosion precisely, but it was devastating enough. A gust of superheated air billowed through the command center. Marble blackened and cracked from the heat and the whole building imploded upon itself. Lush grass dried and caught fire. The battle tanks were unharmed, and power armor was sufficient protection more than a few meters away, but Master Sergeant Jono’s last defiant act nonetheless killed a grand total of two dozen Klingons.

[That NOS Guy]

I don't normally get into fanfics (in fact, I'm an ex-MSTer) but I have to say this is a damn fine piece of work.

You use of imagery is most excellent, I can really get a feel of being there on the spot. My hat is off.

[Junghalli]

CHAPTER 5

Chief Sergeant Lakshmi Durjaya rapped on the heavy, armored door of the Admiral’s cabin. She was terrified to get anywhere near a master of such high rank, but the Captain had assigned the task to her and while simply being around high-ranking Draka might have negative consequences disobeying a direct order from a lower-ranking one certainly would have.

The door swung open with unnatural rapidity. No baseline human could possibly have moved that heavy plate of metal that quickly. Admiral O’Leary stood in the doorway, dressed in a purple bathrobe. She was still tying it together. Curiously, she didn’t look like she’d come out of the shower. Chief Sergeant Durjaya, who like all the Dominate’s subjects knew the proclivities of their masters all too well, decided that quite likely she really didn’t want to know the details.

“What is it Chief Sergeant?” the Admiral asked.

“I-“ stark terror constricted Durjaya’s throat. She had to say something of course, but her guts were telling her that she was in the presence of a vicious predator and she must very quiet, quite for her life, lest it notice her. “Captain Stryker-has asked me to give you this Master” she held out a small datachip in one small brown hand.

O’Leary raised an eyebrow. “What’s this?”

“I-I don’t know” Durjaya managed to cough out. “Its classification level red Master, suicide before reading secret for non-Draka.” That didn’t necessary mean much of course. The Draka liked to keep their servants in the dark, even the trusted ones. The entire net was a classified document to serfs.

O’Leary took the datachip from Durjaya’s hand, and she felt a momentary shudder as the Draka touched her. O’Leary cocked her head to the side. “Come inside Chief Sergeant.” Durjaya’s knees felt like rubber. The last thing she wanted to do was spend more time around the Admiral, and that whispering primitive voice in her warned her against venturing into a dangerous beast’s lair, but there was nothing she could do. Draka genetic engineering had taken away from her the fight or flight response that was present in any other animal. With the possible exception of livestock such as cattle Homo Servus was the only species on Earth that was instinctually inclined to passively submit to its greatest natural predator instead of fight it or run from it. So of course she obeyed the Admiral’s command.

The Admiral’s cabin was sparse and tiny. Inevitable, of course, on a starship. Simply having a private space was a luxury reserved for Citizen officers (of which the average was one per ship). The Admiral looked around for a moment and shook her head with irritation. “I must have left my perscomp in here” she said as she opened the flimsy plastic door to what could only be the head. Durjaya blinked. Why would anybody bring a perscomp in there? O’Leary motioned for the Janissary to follow her. Durjaya felt a twinge of fear at the request, for it was odd and anything unexpected from a Citizen usually spelled trouble. But she followed nonetheless. The conditioning of the Servus was such that if Admiral O’Leary had told her to take a razor and slit her own wrists she’d probably have done it with minimal protest.

The Sarmatian’s Chief Sergeant almost did a double take as she walked into the next room. It was sure as hell no head, that was for sure. It was about the same size as the Admiral’s cabin, but couldn’t have been more different. The heavy metal bulkheads had been covered with panels of richly engraved dark wood. The Sarmatian’s harsh standard-issue light fixtures had been taken out and replaced with elegant fluted wall lamps which cast a soft, almost romantic mellow light. The floor was covered with a gorgeous Persian rug, and heavy Victorian-style cabinet with an enormous mirror was tucked into one cramped corner. Its top was cluttered with what looked to be artworks looted from worlds sacked by the Draka. If Durjaya had not known better she would have thought she’d been in some rich plantation master’s mansion. The only things that ruined the impression were the small size, the noticeable curve of the Sarmatian’s armored outer bulkhead, and the cheap plastic door that lead to the Spartan chamber first chamber. The sight that most attracted her gaze-and triggered her revulsion- was the bed. It was huge, easily five times the size of the tiny thin-matressed cot in the other room, and canopied. Piled haphazardly atop it were thick, soft, and obviously tremendously expensive sheets, and curled within them was a nude feminine form. The figure stirred and Durjaya recognized it as the Vulcan girl the Admiral had brought with her as her personal assistant. Embarrassment and disgust rose up in the Chief Sergeant’s chest, and she struggled to keep either of these emotions from registering on her face. She knew the Admiral could smell her pheromones anyway, but in the tradition of all hunted prey she also knew the safest course was to bring as little attention to herself as possible.

“Why didn’t the Captain just have this piped straight to my perscomp?”

It took a moment for Durjaya to clear her head enough to remember what O’Leary was talking about. She realized to her abject horror that she had spent several seconds staring uncomprehendingly at the Draka.

“Uh-Captain Stryker told me to take it to you personally Master. He-didn’t tell me why Master.”

If O’Leary noticed the lapse she chose magnanimously to overlook it. “I see.” She slid the datachip into the receptacle on her perscomp and began to read. The silence stretched out for long minutes. Durjaya waited to be dismissed. She couldn’t wait to get out of this place and the company of the Draka Admiral and her... personal assistant. No, that wasn’t really the right word at all. She’d seen this all too often. The girl wasn’t a person anymore, not really. She was more like a pet. The thought was so perverse she could barely stand to even finish it in her mind, but it was the truth. Durjaya shuddered, something those who had the displeasure of becoming intimately acquainted with the inner workings of the Dominate generally found themselves doing very often. Not for the first time she found herself intensely grateful for having been conscripted. There were far worse fates awaiting those who fell into the Draka’s power.

After what felt like several geologic epochs Admiral O’Leary looked up at the Chief Sergeant. “Is this some kind of joke?” she asked.

Durjaya furiously tried to think what she could say to get herself out of the path of O’Leary’s wrath, for the path of a pissed of Draka Admiral’s wrath was a very bad place for a serf to be. “I-would not know Master, I only know Captain Stryker told me to present it to you personally. If it is Master I-I wouldn’t be a party to it-Master.”

The Admiral was silent for a few moments. Durjaya prayed to gods of the stories her father and mother had whispered to her on dark and quiet nights when the Draka were all elsewhere that Admiral O’Leary would find somebody to blame other than the messenger.

“Planets lost… outposts destroyed…” she heard O’Leary whispering. “Good God… we’re looking at the loss of the whole Romulan Territories… this can’t be for real…”

“Master?” Durjaya said, moderately concerned.

Admiral Marina O’Leary looked up at her and for a moment Durjaya could have sworn she saw fear in her eyes. “Nothing Chief Sergeant. Carry on about your duties.”

“Yes Master!” Durjaya exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm and strode off with a spring in her step, tremendously relieved to have escaped with her person and career still intact, leaving Marina O’Leary to pore over the unbelievable report with wide, incredulous eyes.
* * *

To its former inhabitants the world of Rubicon IV would have been unrecognizable. Months of ceaseless mining and construction had transformed its surface to barren grey desert scarred with open pit mines so vast that one might be forgiven for mistaking them for natural features. Here and there mountainous complexes of machinery heaved up from the lifeless landscape. Borg construction cranes soared into the brooding polluted clouds, higher than any mountain. And in these vast conglomerations of black metal the creatures that had once been the inhabitants of Rubicon IV labored ceaselessly. The planet was now a Borg construction world, like thousands of others scattered throughout the galaxy. From beneath the soaring cranes, on assembly pads the size of river valleys, cubical mountains of engines and scaffolding 3.2 kilometers on a side were being raised. The sheer scale of the undertaking would have astounded any witnesses. The structures the Borg had constructed on this world made the greatest monuments of humanity appear to be little more than sand castles by comparison. But of course on the whole of Rubicon IV barely a single creature still breathed that was not Borg, and to the Borg themselves this was simply business as usual.

Twice Species 8274 had sent probes to this system to check up upon the loss of communication with the occupation garrison. The first time it had been a single border cutter, the second time a flotilla of two destroyers. And both times the orbiting Borg cube had intercepted them and their knowledge and distinctiveness had been added to the Collective. As a precaution the Borg had capped many of Rubicon IV’s higher mountains with huge disruptor turrets. The planet was well protected now, and at any rate the first cubes were readily. Soon the Borg would no longer have to worry about defending their new fastness from a marauding fleet. Soon they would be able to use it to project power all over this part of the galaxy, assimilating new worlds and creating a hub of Borg outposts and construction sites which would eventually grow to consume every world in the quadrant, just as the Borg would eventually grow to consume the entire galaxy, and then begin to look with speculative eyes toward the Magellanic clouds, and then Andromeda and the other galaxies of the Local Group when they too had been fully assimilated. For all its vast intellect the Borg Collective was at its alien heart not much different from a slime mold. It had only one true purpose: to grow, and grow without limit, until if filled the universe from one corner of creation to the other. It would take time of course, just as water wearing away rock would take time, but that was of no concern. Just like the ocean the Borg had all the time in the universe: the Collective was eternal. The process would be just as slow, and just as inevitable. Even in the event of some terrible catastrophe the Borg had their escape routes, their bolt holes, through which tiny portions of themselves could be scattered like virulent spores to begin the process all over again. For the Borg were not a civilization at all in the conventional sense. They were more like a kind fungus: slow, simple, creeping, and ultimately unstoppable.

The Borg had been adding to their abilities, in their uncaring, fungus-like manner. The new cubes being constructed upon the blasted continents of Rubicon IV integrated the latest technology assimilated from Species 8274. Large bore disruptors, three times as powerful as those of a normal Borg cube, studded their surfaces. Higher performance shield generators had been crafted and installed. And, best of all, all the new cubes were equipped with Species 8274’s instantaneous molehole drive. A transwarp hub was still required for easy access to the Borg’s main holdings on the other side of the galaxy, and the construction of one was certainly a project to be undertaken once resources allowed, but the new molehole-equipped cubes gave the Borg a tremendous strategic advantage over most other species. If such an emotion had not been utterly alien to the implacable, slime mold-like intelligence that was the Borg the Collective would have felt positively buoyant at the new turn of events. Species 8274 had much interesting and useful biological and technological distinctiveness to offer, and the Borg knew, in the same dumb vapid way that they knew everything else, that once this species had been fully assimilated the Borg would have taken a great step forward toward their goal of-well-assimilating more stuff. That was really the only truly accurate way to describe it. Not that the Borg were particularly eager to assimilate the galaxy; they cared not for time and as long as the Collective continued to grow they were content. Those aspects of the universe that did not relate to the growth of the Borg were simply irrelevant. But in the same way that a new sapling instinctively digs its roots through rocks and gravel in search of the quickest way to nutrient rich soil the Borg sought the fastest path to new assimilations.

It was time to launch the fleet, and the silent word was passed through the invisible webs of subspace transmission that formed the intelligence that was the Borg. It was truly a pity that there were no men left alive on Rubicon IV, for the sight that would soon grace that hideously scarred rape victim of a planet would have been astounding indeed. The kilometers-long booms of the almost unimaginably gigantic Borg construction cranes were slowly eased out of the way, their great shadows throwing hills and valleys and mountains into twilight as they moved. Gantries were pulled back from Borg construction towers as high as the greatest skyscrapers of twentieth century Chicago or New York, and docking clamps the size of football stadiums slid away. For several still seconds the great cubes sat free on their launch pads, standing above the city-sized Borg yards like rubex cubes blown up to the size of mountains, white clouds skimming their convoluted sides. Then they began to rise. If any human had seen it he would probably have thought himself gone mad, for it would surely have struck him as impossible that things that would qualify as geological features would simply take off and fly. The Borg had no such emotions, and the legions of drones laboring in the construction yards beneath the ascending cubes didn’t even pause to look up at the horizontal cliff-faces of metal passing directly over them, blocking the sun and turning day into a night gleaming with unhealthy greenish stars. Tube covered variant 1 cubes, black and brooding variant 2s, and massive armored tactical cubes lifted themselves higher and higher on straining, groaning engines, washing the land below them in the gale-force blowback of their rockets. Behind them a swarm of lesser vessels rose into the sky like a horde of insects. Greater than the largest Draka or Alliance craft these smaller creations were nonetheless so numerous and so dwarfed by the huge cubes that they seemed like a swarm of locusts buzzing off in the wake of a flock of majestic raptors. From Borg yards deep below the foaming waves of Rubicon’s IV’s convulsing storm-tossed seas still more cubes rose to join their brethren. They emerged from the turbulent grey waters like soot-impregnated icebergs, millions of gallons of seawater spilling off their sides as they climbed out toward the stars. Higher and higher the mighty fleet rose, the last wisps of atmosphere thinning around them, until at last the tortured world that had once been Rubicon IV fell behind them and one by one the disappeared in blinding flashes of light and radiation.

[Junghalli]

“Molehole incursion forming Master! It’s enormous! The energy level-it must be a whole fleet!”

Captain Robert Scott Anderson turned to his subservient Janissary Chief Sergeant TJ Hairmann. “Alliance, do you think? They might be taking a crack at our Cardassian conquests.” Anderson, of course, did not mention the recent Humiliation of Romulus. That was Red Level Clearance information in the Dominate. If The Race’s foreign serfs ever got wind of just how horribly the Draka had been butchered in the Beta Quadrant there might be rebellions all over the place.

“It’s a possibility Master” TJ Hairmann said. “We’re not all that far from their Darane colony.”

“Hmm, raise shields and arm weapons. Communications, hail the Guardian and tell Captain Rikkesgard to do likewise.”

“Yes my Master!” Communications said. “Yes Master” the Tactical stations picked up.

On the DNS Darkstar Servus and foreign conscripts alike hurried to their stations. The shields flared to life and one by one the weapons systems blinked on. Anderson was pleased with the efficiency of his crew. The round the clock drills for the past three weeks had paid off. After the Humiliation of Romulus the Dominate was taking no chances of being caught with their pants down again.

“Status of the enemy fleet?” Anderson asked.

“Unknown Master” Radar reported. “They’re too far away to show up on radar.”

“We’ll have to get closer” Anderson decided. “Time to intercept?”

“Three hours at flank speed” the Helm reported.

“Have the Guardian come to within ninety thousand kilometers for a close range scan” Anderson said. “The Darkstar will hang back by three hundred thousand kilometers.”

“Yes Master” Communications said.


The Guardian flew towards the presumed Alliance invasion fleet at a respectable clip, determined to intercept it well before it could reach the former Cardassian colony of Telkur, since rechristened Nova Palestina and resettled by approved species, after the Cardassian population had been exterminated of course.

“Anything?” Captain Pauline Rikkesgard asked as she absently twiddled with her curly brown hair.

“No Master” Radar said. “Nothing yet Master.”

After perhaps fifteen minutes the Radarman spoke up again. “I think I have something Master-no, wait, this can’t be right.”

“Report” Rikkesgard said.

“It’s nothing” Radar said. “It must be an asteroid, it’s too big to be a starship. But… it reads as cubical Master.”

“Cubical?” Rikkesgard felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Her instinct, honed by more than a hundred years as a starship captain, was telling her that something was definitely not right. “What are its coordinates?”

“Four hundred thousand kilometers on the Y axis, seven hundred thousand kilometers on the X axis, and two hundred and fifty seven thousand kilometers on the Z axis Master.” Radar replied.

“Passive, scan that area, see if you pick up an electromagnetic signature, heat print, anything.”

It took a moment for Passive to give her report, and when she did she sounded unsure. “I don’t know what that is Master but… that’s no asteroid. It’s got a massive electromagnetic signature.”

“Communications, hail the Darkstar and tell that what we found.”

“Yes Master.”


“Master, the Guardian reports sighting a cube-shaped vessel 3.2 kilometers on a side off our starboard side.”

Captain Robert Scott Anderson’s eyes narrowed at the Communications Officer. “Are you sure about that son?”

“Yes Master, the report was quite clear Master.”

“Radar, do a pan-scan and see what turns up” Anderson ordered.

“Yes Master.” Radar bent over his instruments. “Several meteorites… a class II asteroid, and… wait. That’s no asteroid. It’s a perfect cube. 3.2 kilometers on a side. No way it’s Alliance but… that’s gotta be man-made.”

“Or something-made” Chief Sergeant TJ Hairmann pointed out.

“Passive, scan that thing” Captain Anderson commanded.

“Yes Master” Passive paused. “Master, in the electromagnetic spectrum that thing looks like a fireworks display at a victory parade; huge electromagnetic signature.”

“Captain, we are being hailed” Communications said.

“By the cube?” Anderson asked.

“Yes my Master.”

“Put it on” Captain Anderson said after a moment’s consideration.

“Yes my Master.” A strange voice boomed through the Darkstar’s speakers. A voice that seemed not to be a voice at all but rather the combined voices of hundreds, like a sinister choir.

YOU ARE SPECIES 8274, HOMO DRAKENSIS.

“We are” Robert Scott Anderson addressed himself to the voice. “Nice to make your acquaintance. Surrender and stand down. You’re now our property. Resist and you will be punished.”

PROPERTY IS IRRELEVANT. PUNISHMENT IS IRRELEVANT. WE ARE THE BORG. LOWER YOUR SHIELDS AND SURRENDER YOUR SHIPS. WE WILL ADD YOUR BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS TO OUR OWN. YOUR CULTURE WILL ADAPT TO SERVICE US.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

“Not being very compliant, are they?” Captain Anderson observed. “We’ll just have to break them in a bit. Have the Guardian engage.”


“Launch missiles at that ship” Captain Rikkesgard said. “Let’s see how these ‘Borg’ like the taste of nuclear radiation.”

“Yes my Master” Second Tactical said. Three missiles flew out of the missile tubes of the Guardian and closed the distance towards the Borg ship. Rikkesgard watched as the dots signifying the missiles grew closer and closer to the red X of the enemy vessel on the tactical chart, and then merged with it.

“Target remains Master” Radar said.

“No noticeable change in power readings Master” Passive added.

Rikkesgard shrugged. “Launch another salvo, four missiles this time. If that doesn’t work give me a full alpha strike.”

“Master!” Passive interrupted. “I’m reading a huge buildup of energy on the Borg vessel!”

“Launch those missiles-“ she started to scream. She was a puff of vapor drifting in space before she got to finish the sentence.


“Master! The Borg vessel just fired some kind of particle cannon at the Guardian. Power readings off the scale Master!” Passive yelled.

“Status of the Guardian?” Captain Anderson inquired.

“It’s” Radar swallowed audibly “it’s-gone Master.”

Robert Scott Anderson eyed the Radar technician incredulously. “What do you mean it’s gone?”

“Just that” Radar said. “I’m not getting any radar echoes from it. Not even debris. It’s like it was just… vaporized, or fragmented into fist-size pieces.”

“The Borg weapon went through its shields like they weren’t even there” Passive said breathily. “It didn’t even pause, it just… destroyed it. Thor’s prick, it had every meter on my board going off the scale! The energy, the power…”

“Shut up serf” Anderson commanded. The Draka had shown weakness and it must now be countered with a show of strength. “Draw to fifty thousand kilometers and engage.”

“Yes Master” the Helmsman said.


The Borg were not pleased to see the performance of their new particle cannon. That was not because it had performed poorly, indeed it had done its job very well, but because such an emotion was totally alien to their way of thinking. The new weapon would make it easier for them to assimilate Species 8274, and that in turn would add to their perfection, which would allow them to assimilate yet more species because, well, because they could. The logic of the Borg was ironically much closer to that of the Draka than either side would ever realize. The Borg might have appreciated this cosmic joke but of course it simply never occurred to them. Irony did not lead to the growth of the Borg and was therefore irrelevant to them.

The new particle cannons were one of the many useful technologies Species 8274 had already offered the Borg. When the Borg had captured the experimental Scimitar they had naturally been profoundly interested in the weapon that had done significant damage to their own vessel. It had been taken to Borg Assembly World 17,581 (known to its now fully assimilated aboriginal population as Etora and to Species 8274 as Rubicon IV) where it had been studied, assimilated, improved with Borg technology, replicated, and mounted in every cube produced at Assembly World 17,581. Tied to the far larger power grid of a Borg cube and improved with the already long-assimilated technology of a hundred consumed civilizations it was now almost twice as powerful as the cannon the Scimitar had mounted and did not suffer from the combat liability of the Scimitar’s long recharge period. It would tear apart even the largest and most powerful Species 8274 vessels with one shot, and the Borg variant 2 cubes produced at Assembly World 17,581 each mounted over two hundred of them. Borg cube 32,476,551 could easily have destroyed the larger Species 8274 vessel instantly, but there were the new Species 8274 disruptors to be tested as well.


The Hellion class destroyer DNS Darkstar flew crazy loops around the Borg vessel, firing missiles at it every few moments. The Helmsman pulled off the most daring and intricate maneuvers of his life that day, horribly certain that at any moment the same weapon that had obliterated the Guardian would land upon the Darkstar and his personal body.

“Master, our missiles do not appear to be having any effect” Passive said. “It’s almost as if the enemy’s shields have been somehow optimized to resist them.”

“Keep firing” Robert Scott Anderson said. “Helm, keep up evasive maneuvers. Our shields can’t take their fire, so we’re going to have to make sure they don’t get a chance to nail us. Keep up heavy ECM jamming to make sure they don’t get a lock.” He was answered with a chorus of “yes Master” from men who didn’t really need to be told. A demonstration of the weapons of their new enemy had been all they needed to convince them that if they didn’t do exactly that their lives would be extinguished at any second.

“Master, the Borg ship is firing at us!” Passive screamed. “Less powerful weapons than ones we just saw, some kind of disruptor, but still very powerful.”

“Make a quick swoop at them to get us in optimal beam weapons range and give me an alpha strike” Captain Anderson said.

“Yes Master” the Helmsman said, visibly paling at the thought of having to get closer to that cube-shaped monster. The Darkstar turned away from the cube and executed a looping turn, for just a moment coming to a hair-raisingly close thirty thousand kilometers of it. At that moment scores of missiles spurted forth from the Darkstar’s main batteries at once, accompanied by a supporting orchestra of plasma burners and particle beams. The whole heaping helping of destruction splattered into the Borg cube like pies in a food fight, and did about as much actual harm.

“No effect Master” Passive said. The Darkstar’s deck shook violently. “They’ve hit us!” he cried hysterically. Captain Anderson panic grab him for a moment before he realized that several seconds had passed and he was still alive.

“Turn us around and fire again!” he roared.

“Yes Master!” the Helmsman said. The deck shook again. This time it canted to one sound as the artificial gravity began to fail, and several alarms began to sound.

“The Borg just knocked out our main shield generator!” the Chief Engineer bellowed. “I’ve got the backups working, but they also hit our engines and damaged them badly. We’re dead in the water Master.”

“What are we going to do now Master?” TJ Hairmann wailed. Captain Robert Scott Anderson wished he knew.

“The Borg ship is closing with us Master” Radar said. “It’s drawn to within five hundred kilometers. It’s stopped.”

“They’re firing!” Passive screamed. The deck shook again and again it seemed to cant as the dying gravity generators wheezed.

“They’ve taken out one of our backup generators and the other one’s failing!” the Chief Engineer exclaimed. As he spoke there was a whine in the air and… something solidified in the center of the bridge. It towered over the crew, its head almost brushing the ceiling. Its skin was grey and wet-looking, with hideous fat black veins. It was covered with some kind of metallic exoskeleton and one of its eyes had been plucked out and replaced with some kind of camera. In place of its left arm there was a disruptor rifle grafted to its body, and in place of its right arm there was a hooked prosthesis almost like a lobster’s claw. It looked horribly familiar, and it took Anderson a moment to realize what it was. It was hellhound; one of the genetically engineered soldiers of the Dominate, but transformed into some sort of cyborg. The horror began lurching toward him like Frankenstein in some ancient black and white motion picture.

“Help!” Captain Anderson cried. “Protect me!”

“Yes my Master!” TJ Hairmann said proudly as he stepped between Anderson and the oncoming nightmare. He drew a plasma pistol and shot it point blank in the chest. The plasma pistol would have gone through the armor of a twentieth century tank with ease, but it was impotently deflected by some sort of personal forcefield. The thing raised its wickedly clawed prosthetic and slashed. Chief Sergeant Hairmann recoiled, blood trickling from a nasty cut on his arm. Robert Scott Anderson throttled his dominance pheromones to their maximum and cried “Help me escape!”

“It is an honor to die for you Master” Hairmann said and threw himself at the thing. And die he did. The cyborg hellhound ripped open his belly with its claw and he fell to the deck, the wet ropes of his exposed entrails glistening juicily. The abomination continued to advance on Anderson, its claw dripping with the late Janissary’s vital fluids. Anderson unbuckled his restraints and flew into action, landing a punishing kick on the monstrosity’s zombie-like face and caving in its skull. He landed, breathing heavily, and slammed down on the intercom button on his Captain’s chair.

“Security, get some hellhounds up here! We’re being boarded!”

“Master, the boarding actions are taking place all over the ship!” the raspy voice of the head hellhound said over the radio link. “As we speak I am pinned down in a corridor just outside main engineering! Some sort of cyborgs are beaming over in large numbers!” There was a sound of a disruptor being fired and a yelp like a dog that had just been shot, and then the line went dead.

Swirling columns of light took shape right next to Captain Anderson and then, to his horror, more of the hideous hellhound-cyborgs materialized. There were two of them this time. The Chief Engineer grabbed his plasma pistol and shot one to no effect. It raised the disruptor rifle where one of its arms had been and blew a smoking hole in his chest. Other Janissaries began to fire, and they too were shot. Others rushed the strange cyborgs. The modified hellhounds permitted them to get close and then injected them with some kind of tubule, causing them to fall to the floor unconscious. What the hell was going on here? Was this some sort of secret Krypteria project that had gotten out of hand? Anderson didn’t have time to wonder about these things, for one of the cyborgs seized him. Anderson struggled against its grip but it was even stronger than a normal hellhound. It held him up at arms length, his feet kicking uselessly at empty air, and sent a pair of black tubules into his jugular vein. Then it threw him down and he fell back into his heavily padded Captain’s chair, a pair of puncture wounds on his throat. He tried to run but he found that whatever drug they had injected him with had completely immobilized him. He couldn’t even get his foot out of Chief Sergeant Hairmann’s cooling intestines.


The new disruptors had performed satisfactorily, and the Species 8274 spacecraft was totally disabled. Tactical drones made quick work of the Species 8274 security squads, then more specialized drones were beamed over to begin the assimilation of the vessel’s technology. A huge door opened in the side of Borg cube 32,476,551 and a forcefield flickered on to retain the cube’s atmosphere. A tractor beam extended and reeled in the dead Species 8274 craft, dragging it through the forcefield. In the center of the Borg variant 2 cube there was an open space the size of a town, in the center of which was set a cube-shaped escape pod that was itself larger than the biggest Species 8274 spacecraft. This meant that the variant 2 lacked the redundancy, durability, and power of the variant 1, being essentially a hollow shell. But the hollow space was an excellent feature in a cube class specialized to assimilate ship technology, for it was filled with facilities for storing, disassembling, and examining captured spacecraft.

Even as swarms of drones were crawling over the hull of the Darkstar cube 32,476,551 entered low orbit of the Species 8274 colony world. Its sensors registered theatre shields being raised over the inhabited areas. This would be a good opportunity to test the new particle cannons against a live planetary target. Twenty of the mighty guns fired at once, and their beams shredded the theatre shields and gouged out huge craters in the ground. Cube 32,476,551 found the garrison installations on the planet and destroyed them with surgically precise disruptor fire. The planet’s defense forces were now in complete disarray, and the assimilations could begin.
* * *

Cygnus 1 had been one of the first worlds to have the displeasure of knowing the rule of the Draka. The first probes had reached it while the Draka were still in the slow, patient phase of their expansion, before molehole drive had given them into an empire. It was the first planet to be reached with faster than light ships from Earth. The Draka had established a modest colony in the planet’s southern hemisphere. The aboriginal inhabitants, a race of squat four-eyed beaked semi-humanoids, had been at a bronze age level at the time. They were utterly helpless in the face of invasion. Some were now slaves toiling in the colony, doing the work that on an uninhabited world would be the tasks of Servus. Others continued living their short, miserable lives in the wilderness, aware of their world’s occupation only because the invaders hunted them for barbarous sport. Cygnus 1 had no resources of any particular value, and the Draka had an empire to build and were at any rate not a fast-multiplying species. The colony had remained nothing more than a single town for more than a century. The insignificant system was only sporadically patrolled. When the Borg cube appeared at the inner edge of the systems comet belt there was nothing there to stop it. As it fell into orbit of Cygnus 1 it found several armed satellites and destroyed them with missiles.

A Borg tractor beam flickered through Cygnus 1’s cloudy, moist atmosphere and sipped energy from the glimmering theatre shield of the colony. After a few minutes the shield failed and the powerful gravitic beam latched onto the amalgamated metal foundation of the colony complex itself. The whole city was ripped from the earth and lifted into the cloudy morning sky. From the distant mountains a trio of the natives gaped at the surreal sight. The town grew smaller and smaller, finally dwindling into the thin white clouds, leaving a trail of debris falling to the ground as it went.

At first most of the colony’s inhabitants were unharmed. But as the air began to grow thinner and thinner they gradually realized they were surely doomed. They died choking in the icy near-vacuum of Cygnus 1’s upper atmosphere. The Borg cube pulled it towards itself and a giant door opened to receive it. The tractor beam slowly rotated the colony around while a yellow-white cutting laser neatly sliced it into manageable chunks. Other tractor beams caught the pieces and drew them into the Borg cube, where they were brought to rest in the vast enclosure within. When the last bits had been brought in the door closed, cutting the view of the stars and the brilliant white and blue landscape of Cygnus 1 from the stygian darkness of the cube.

Over the next several days the colony was disassembled and examined by legions of technical drones. Databanks were cracked and their contents absorbed into the ever growing knowledge of the Collective. Potential useful devices were meticulously scanned so that the technologies they represented could be reverse-engineered and assimilated. Anything immediately useful was added to the structure of the cube itself. Thus it was that no two Borg cubes were exactly alike: as they roamed the galaxy they acquired unique special features from assimilated civilizations. Nothing was wasted. Even the dead bodies of the Draka and their slaves were liquefied and fed into the cube’s power nodes. The cube remained for several days orbiting Cygnus 1 like a snake lazily digesting a large meal, then activated its molehole drive system and went off in search of more installations and worlds to assimilate.

[Junghalli]

The question is, will god-Janeway intervene to save her rabid little children?.

She'll undoubtedly try, but there's only so much she can do. You're really, REALLY screwed when even the Q Continuum has it in for you. They'll stop any temporal screwing around she tries to do. The best thing she can do is give the Snakes foreknowledge (like in Xeeleeverse: "on January 30th the Borg will send a tactical cube to Craphole III, have a fleet waiting"), and maybe slip them a little Imperial tech from some of the SWvsST timelines. It may slow down the Borg advance a bit while they're still restricted to what that one forgeworld can crank out (and whatever else they can assimilate), but once the transwarp conduit is up the Draka are fucked with a ten foot barb-wire encircled electrified dildo. Look at what they did to Rubicon IV in two months and think of the kind of ungodly war machine they've got in the Delta Quadrant, where they've been doing this for 50,000 years. In case you're following the designation numbers yes, the Borg in this galaxy really do have over 17,000 heavily industrialized worlds and more than 30 million cubes. The Empire has nothing on these guys in terms of industrial capacity. Throw in the fact that these are souped-up Borg with molehole tech and Draka-derived weapons that tear up any vessel in the Alpha Quadrant in one shot and this is just cruel.

And considering that each Borg cube mounts 200 of these super-cannons this gives me a gloriously sadistic idea. A single Borg cube lets a huge Draka fleet swarm around it, just sitting there while they pound it. Then all 200 super-cannons lock on to one ship and let fly at the same time. Half your fleet wiped out in one shot.

[NecronLord]

The Empire has nothing on these guys in terms of industrial capacity.

Been smoking something heavy have you?

[Ford Prefect]

Well, I have to say, this is a brilliantly written fic, and quite satisfying. Reading these small snippets of the seriously fucked up Draka really makes me want to beat their collective fictional heads out with a baseball bat.

Thankfully, you've gotten around to letting the Borg do it, which is fine by me. I hate the Draka (for what they are, whoever invented them is a genius).

KILL THEM WITH FIRE! RAR!

[speaker-to-trolls]

Just read the last two chapters, all I can say is , brilliant stuff, man.

It would really suck to be O'leary at this point, sure, the whole Draka civilisation is fucked, but it's worse for her because she knows how fucked it is.

[NecronLord]

I hate the Draka (for what they are, whoever invented them is a genius).

It would be if his alt. history was sane. As it is, the draka survive for... no reason whatsoever.

[Junghalli]

Been smoking something heavy have you?

The fumes of Sterlings Draka-wanking. It's like painting in an unventilated room!

Reading these small snippets of the seriously fucked up Draka really makes me want to beat their collective fictional heads out with a baseball bat.

This is nothing. If you really want to see the Draka at their vilest look up Mission to Moscow in our fanfic board. It makes you advocate General Order 18.

KILL THEM WITH FIRE! RAR!

Killing is too good for them. After being assimilated they can spend the rest of their long, long lives being continuously mind-raped by the Borg. It's a wonderfully appropriate punishment for them. The Collective is the ultimate egalitarian society: you're just a part of that giant machine of the Borg, which exists only to expand and expand and expand until it consumes the entire universe for no other reason than because it can (ironically Drakan logic there, eh?). The Borg aren't really a civilization at all in the sense we think of it, they're more like some kind of sapient slime-mold. They exist only to expand and consume, and everything else is irrelevant. At least that's my vision of them anyway, and why I think they're so cool. Everything the Draka put so highly; domination and bending over others to your will, is totally meaningless to the Borg.

I hate the Draka (for what they are, whoever invented them is a genius).

It would be if his alt. history was sane. As it is, the draka survive for... no reason whatsoever.

It's all Sith Godess Janeway's doing! She used her uber-Sith powers to feed the first Draka Dark Side energy, twisting their minds and culture into the Nazi Spartan-Mongols we all know and love, while throwing the shroud of the Dark Side over the Alliance leaders so they couldn't see the writing on the wall, all the while intervening at key historical events to set things up in the Draka's favor and feeding them bits of advanced tech taken from other timelines. It's the only logical explanation for how Sterling's wankfest timeline could have come to pass!

[Junghalli]

A little timeline I whipped up for this universe. I didn't put anything before the Final War because up to Drakon it's all the same as Sterling's original timeline, this being a direct sequel to his series.

2000: Final War. Draka unification of Earth. Alliance remnant escapes to Alpha Centauri.

2176: Fearing eventual Draka incursions into other galaxies or timelines the Q begin cutting of all wormholes and other connections to other galaxies.

2428: Molehole drive is discovered by Alliance remnant.

2442: Events of Drakon. Draka get molehole tech.

2458: Draka conquest of Vulcan.

2465: Draka conquest of Telar.

2467: Alliance survey craft reach Betazed.

2472: Alliance survey craft reach Trill homeworld.

2478: Alliance survey craft reached Omega IV.

2483-85: Acting on warning from Daniels the Xindi launch their weapon probe at Earth. The Draka trace the Xindi back to their homeworld and enserf them.

2501: Alliance survey craft reach Magna Roma.

2518-21: Draka encounter the Andorian Empire. The Andorians are severely undermilitarized, with an army consisting mostly of light infantry, and are easily conquered.

2529-31: Draka-Romulan War. Romulans are enserfed. The Draka destroy Remus with a Shiva Device. Romulan homeworld population commits mass suicide rather than be taken alive. Klingon intelligence agencies see the writing on the fall; the Klingon Empire begins a crash militarization program.

2537: the Klingon Empire sends an expedition to contact the Alliance as a potential ally.

2554-57: Klingon-Draka War. With help from the Alliance the Klingon Empire repells Drakan invasion forces but is not strong enough to take the war to the Draka core systems. The Draka pull back to well-consolidated worlds.

2564: Alliance survey craft reach Mintaka.

2594-98: Draka-Ferengi War. Ferengi colonies and homeworld are destroyed with Shiva Devices.

2611-14: Draka-Cardassian War. Cardassian colonies and homeworld are destroyed with Shiva Devices. The Alliance seizes the opportunity to claim Bajor and its strategically located wormhole, leading to a limited ground war between US and Dominate forces on Bajor.

2621: The Draka enserf the So'na. The Ragnarok Device is created from So'na isolitic subspace weaponry.

2635: Draka conquest of the Talarian Steadhold.

2641-45: Alliance-Dominion War. The Dominion military is very poorly equipped and the Alliance defeats it completely, liberating most of its occupied systems.

2653: The DNS Thor's Hammer encounters a Borg cube in a solar system near the Dominate's Beta Quadrant Frontier.

[Xon]

I got the End of Eternals referance(Asimov), as well as the Dawn of Forever series by Sonnenburg.

There is posible a reference to the Foundation Series too in End of Eternals.

[Setzer]

Heh. I don't care what Marina realizes the Borg will do.

It must be a mercy compared to knowing that Janeway is the custodian of your culture.

[Junghalli]

I got the End of Eternals referance(Asimov), as well as the Dawn of Forever series by Sonnenburg.
There is posible a reference to the Foundation Series too in End of Eternals.

I was wondering when somebody was going to get the Asimov connection. The Eternals attempts to produce a human-friendly (which apparently translated to human-only in their minds) universe seemed like a pretty good kick-off to the whole Temporal Wars buisness. I kind of like the multiverse concept in the way that lets all the different SF universes exist at once, but the full-on many worlds theory with the universe splitting with every single decision always gave me headaches. I thought this was a nice compromise.
It also goes a long way to explaning why the Trekverse is such a weird place: it's one of the Eternals failed experiments; in a sense it's artificial.

It must be a mercy compared to knowing that Janeway is the custodian of your culture.

Sith-Godess Janeway impressed me as a god that would suit the Draka well.