When hailed they are met by the image of a well groomed man with a goatee in a grey uniform who, in the refined tones of an educated southern gentleman declares himself Rear Admiral Tobias Minor of CSS New Alabama and that they have entered the space claimed by the New Confederate States. He is somewhat cordial once he finds out that the crew of the Enterprise is human and offers if Captain Archer would come aboard for dinner and an exchange information on how things have gone in the last three centuries for their respective worlds. There is some awkwardness involving Lieutenant Tucker and Ensign Mayweather.
Basically what happened was that some time in 1862 in Southern Georgia a device was found in a cave that when activated opened a portal to another world (the Planet that has since been known as Davis), which was secured and explored by the Confederate Army along with a few civilians who sought to settle it. The world was Earthlike in general terms and was populated by some natives which had blue skin, lumpy foreheads, horns and were herbivorous and were at a bronze age level of development. When general Sherman marched to the sea, thousands of refugees were directed by the General through the gate as well as 3,000 CSA soldiers and 8,000 slaves and to prevent the gate from falling into US Army hands it was blasted, disabling the mechanism and caving in the cave. The 42,000 men, women and children that got through were left on Davis. As such they dug in, built new farms, plantations and towns, raised families, created a new government and soon moved to conquer this new world. Since they had rifles, revolvers and cannons while the natives had linen vests, hide shield, flint arrows and bronze swords and spears the locals were subdued and put into slavery going by the idea that they had Dominion over them as non humans. Gradually the New Confederate States expanded it's influence over the planet as new armies were raised and more natives were enslaved. Their area of influence grew steadily as did their population.
At the rate that they were going due to total population, levels of education, competition, natural resources in the heartland of the New Confederacy and social factors on the course they were on originally they would have achieved about an 1960s-1990s level of technology by the 2150s, but in 2042 they found a crashed Starship, which they excavated, studied and eventually managed to power up some of it's systems including a secondary reactor, a shuttle-craft and a couple of it's computers which contained enough historical and scientific information to accelerate their development by centuries. They launched their first warp capable spacecraft in 2101, which caused them to turn their eyes to the starts and eventually to colonize two planets (the first one being uninhabited, the second one containing another pre-industrial species that they enslaved) and they had enough trouble with pirates to build a fleet to defend themselves and bought, salvaged and stole new technology to upgrade their machinery.
The New Confederacy has a population of about 100,000,000 humans (they've used cloning to boost their population growth in the last 40 years) and 750,000,000 conquered aliens that exist in permanent slavery. They had something akin to Feminism happen stretched out over most of the 20th and early 21st century and after some considerable debate eventually abolished negro slavery in 2023, though there is still some tension over it. All men are required to serve for 2.6 earth years in their military and to drill twice a year until their fifty, leaving aside career military types. Women can serve voluntarily. Their army is on the whole professional and has armored infantry, ground vehicles, artillery and air support. The New Confederacy's society is oligarchical, every human citizen has a right to vote but in practice the economy and political sphere is dominated by a few hundred prominent families who run various large industrial enterprises. Most of the rest of the human population work for them and voting against your employer is a big no-no as outside of charity there is no form of welfare. Each of the big combines run by said families has a cloning operation in which favored employees are cloned, raised and educated by said company and are employed by them afterwards (usually having to work for 5-10 years to pay off debts incurred in their creation and education). The only people who have a hope in hell of winning an election at anything more than. Slaves are outfitted with tracking implants that can stimulate pain nerves or induce seizures to keep them in line while their owners have the power of life and death over them, with most of them living on large industrial facilities or plantations with others being employed in the service sector, as personal servants or workers for the government. A few million slaves have been raised by the government to be soldiers modeled on the Ottoman Janissaries (though under supervision by Human officers).
The New Confederate Navy has a total of thirteen starships (with a fourteenth under construction) of which the New Alabama class is the newest and largest, being able to reach Warp 3. All three of them have been sent to meet the Enterprise and a fight between said squadron and an NX-class ship could go either way. In addition there are hundreds of civilian transports, both for in system and interstellar. The New Confederacy does not have an ambition of retaking earth baring the fantasies of a few romantics, though they do feel that to secure the future of their nation they need to establish themselves as an interstellar power. At Warp 5 they are more than a month from earth.
What happens and how would you advise Captain Archer and Starfleet to handle this development?
Zor
