The Klingon Front

Posted on Fri Jul 3rd, 2026 @ 5:06pm by Lieutenant Viviana Del Rio & Commander Jonathan Grayson & Lieutenant JG Kate Kono & Lieutenant JG James Phoenix

3,354 words; about a 17 minute read

Mission: Sins of the Empire
Location: Planet

The away team materialized in the tree line, 20 minutes outside the outer edge of the Klingon colony capital. The sound of Klingon targs roaming around was prevalent. Viviana looked around as they materialized. "Well, another trapsing through nature. At least we know what to expect here" Vivana stated deadpan, a look towards Phoenix and Kate.

Ibarra took out her tricorder and began scanning the area. She looked to Jon, "We are exactly where we wanted to be Commander. Local wildlife is about, but no Klingon troops nearby. We should have a clear path into the city."

"That will be where things get bloody. Just remember, the Klingons will use disruptors to start with, but once we get into the city itself, I fully expect them to turn to their more savage ways, using their melee tactics with their bat'leths and mek'leths.

"We move in straight line." Jon ordered. "When we get to the city, Wyatt, Vienna, James and Viviana are one team. Kate, Ibarra, Hathaway and I are another team. it doubles our chances and reduces risks of all of us getting captured or worse." He looked at the assembled group, "Any questions? Oh. remember we're here to engage the Klingon rebel forces, hook up with Commander Smith's team and capture Toral."

Kate moved silently behind Greyson and Ibarra, Hathaway at the rear, the four of them peeling off once the city came into view. The Klingon rounded the corner at a lazy, unsuspecting pace, a warrior by the look of him. The blades at both hips, the ridge of his brow catching the light. He never reached them. Kate already had the Ka-Bar in her hand, having used it to clear away a thorny brush between the trees. Without breaking stride Kate closed the distance the moment the Klingon caught the group and drove the blade into the front of his neck, angling up through the tissue. He made a sound like a drain unclogging. Hathaway was on him immediately, pinning his arms as Kate worked the blade to open the throat further, then sheathed it and pushed her fingers into the wound.

The tissue was hot and slick and she found the severed esophagus and folded it over on itself, collapsing the airway, and pressed her palm flat against the outside of his throat to hold the fold in place. The Klingon's eyes went wide and rolling white. His legs kicked in long slow arcs. He could not scream. The sounds he made were small and wet and internal, the sounds of a body arguing with itself.

His face darkened to the color of old liver as Hathaway bore his full weight down onto the pinned arms and Kate kept her hand where it was, feeling the pulse in his throat go from a gallop to a stagger to nothing. His legs slowed. His bladder let go. She held the fold for another thirty seconds before she withdrew her hand, wiped her fingers on her thigh, and looked at Hathaway. She nodded once. They dragged him to the drainage ditch and dropped him in. His blades were still in their sheaths.

Kate wiped her blood soaked hand on her pants and returned to the group.

Hathaway was still at the ditch, pressing foliage back into place with both hands. She let out a slow breath. Too close. When Hataway came back, he wouldn't look at anything but her face, studying it the way you'd study something you weren't sure you recognized anymore.

Kate's eyes traced the wall's edge, searching for a seam, a shadow, any opening that might swallow them whole. The tree line had been forgiving in its wildness, but the city offered no such mercy. Every surface here was deliberate, watched. She, Ibarra, Hathaway and Greyson would be four wrong notes in an otherwise perfect score the moment anyone laid eyes on them. The walls were close enough now that even a whisper felt dangerous, and her questions collected silently behind her teeth, unanswered.

Ibarra looked horrified at what Kate had done. Getting past the shock, she had to ask, "Why did you kill him? And in such a horrific manner no less. You didn't even determine if he was a hostile. He might have been on our side, or even a noncombatant. And we have phasers for a reason" she said in hysterics.

Kate held Ibarra's gaze for a moment, her expression unreadable. She drew her phaser slowly from its holster and turned it once in her hand so Ibarra could see it was now in her hands and on a medium-stun just the way Ibarra wanted, then pressed a single finger to her own lips and nodded toward the perimeter. The message was clear enough. She rested her hand briefly and kindly on Ibarra's shoulder before moving on, the touch there and gone like something that had never happened at all.

She recognized the look on Ibarra's face. She had worn it herself, once. That was the part that stayed with her, longer than she would have liked.

The camp sprawled ahead of them through the treeline, larger than any of them had anticipated. Firelight moved between the structures in long orange ribbons, throwing shadows up against hide walls and stacked supply crates. The sound reached them before anything else did: a low, rolling chorus of Klingon voices carrying across the dark in something that was almost a song. Beneath it came the smell of roasting meat, heavy and sweet and faintly charred, and underneath that the sharp fermented bite of blood wine, unmistakable and thick enough to taste. Somewhere deeper in, percussion. Drums, or something like them.

Jon looked at Ibarra and then shot a look at Kate. He shook his head at the silent pantomime and whispered, "Enough Kate. Then to Ibarra, breathe through your nose , nice deep breaths to settle yourself."

Once it became clear they were far enough not to be overheard, Kate let out a quiet breath and turned to Ibarra.

"I apologize. I was worried we were too close and I shouldn't talk. I meant no disrespect." Kate kept her voice low. "I had my knife in my hand instead of my phaser and I had to move. The right side was my responsibility. I should have had the right tool ready." She paused, searching Ibarra's face. She had seen what Kate had done, and Kate felt the weight of that. It had become too easy, lately, the killing. She had stopped feeling the full shape of it until she saw it reflected in someone else's eyes, someone who still carried the kind of conscience Kate worried she was slowly losing. She glanced over at Jon, hoping he could read the apology in her expression, and stayed close to Ibarra's side.

Jon saw the silent apology in Kate's eyes. She was good officer with more experience she could be a great officer. She just needed to look before leaping. He was going to recommend she see a counselor when they got back to the ship. Killing was becoming her default mode, almost second nature and taking another life should never be easy.

Kate moved up behind Jon, keeping Ibarra within arm's reach on her left. Behind them, Hathaway's footsteps were slow and deliberate, his attention on their back trail. At the clearing's edge she unslung the phaser-rifle, thumbed the setting down to medium stun, and scanned the wall. The bloodwine had done its work. Two sentries sat propped against the base of a watchtower with the boneless, total stillness of men who had stopped caring about anything, and between them a wide section of the perimeter stood open and dark and completely unattended.

Kate glanced at Jon, trying to read whether he had already chosen the spot. He gave nothing away. She turned back to the sentries. Both of them had the particular quality of stillness that had nothing to do with discipline. One had his head tipped back against the watchtower post, mouth open, the whites of his eyes catching the distant firelight. The other had folded forward over his own knees like something with no bones left in it. The bloodwine had done a thorough job. She could have walked up and laced their boots together and neither one would have stirred.

She wondered if Klingons had shoelaces. The one with his head tipped back was already accounted for in her mind: phaser at close range, stun setting, clean. The open-eyed one was hers. She had already mapped the angle, the distance, the order of movement. Jon had point and the final call on the sentries, and she would not step on that. Her job was the right side clearing, same as it always was. She kept Ibarra in her peripheral vision. Her fellow officer had seen enough for one night.

Stun gave you a body that breathed, and breathing bodies eventually stood back up. Four hours, maybe six if the bloodwine had done enough work, and then you had a Klingon who remembered your face and had a personal reason to find you again. She had spent two years on a Section 31 list for exactly that kind of arithmetic, and getting off it had required a number of decisions she did not revisit often or lightly. The permanent solution was cleaner. It did not follow you. She understood this the way she understood how to field-strip a phaser in the dark: not as a moral position, but as a fact about how things worked. She looked at the sentries. She looked at Ibarra. The girl's face was still carrying what she had seen earlier, and Kate recognized the specific weight of it, the way it sat in the jaw and the eyes both at once. She would use the stun setting. Some costs were worth paying twice.

Kate caught Ibarra's eye and held it, searching her face the way you check a wound you caused by accident. She tried a small smile. She wasn't sure it landed right. She turned back toward Jon and kept moving. There had been a version of her that would have needed someone to check on her the same way, after something like tonight. She had done the arithmetic on when exactly that version had been replaced by this one and had never arrived at a clean answer. The arrows had started it, or maybe the table, or the dog, or the thing above the galactic plane that had looked back at her from behind the eyes of people once familiar faces as they tried to murder her in the dark. Somewhere in the accumulation she had learned to go cold on command, and the horror of it was how little horror remained in the knowing. She kept Ibarra in the edge of her vision. Whatever she was still holding onto, whatever had not yet been converted into something useful and merciless, it was small now and she guarded it the way you guard a flame in bad weather: not because you are sure it will last, but because you are not ready to see it go out. Ibarra was proof that Kate’s flame was still there, small and guttering but present. Kate had put that look in her eyes, had handed her something heavy and permanent that a person should not yet be carrying, and the urge to take it back was almost physical. She knew she couldn't. You could not unshow a person what they had seen; the darkest parts of themselves doing the darkest of things. But Ibarra had not yet learned to stop flinching, and that flinch was the thing Kate was trying to protect, the last proof that Kate herself had not finished becoming whatever she was in the process of becoming. If Kate could keep herself from going all the way cold, maybe the effort of it would be enough to keep one small part of herself warm before this was all over.

Seconds had passed. Feet, not yards. Kate held the phaser steady on their flank and let her attention move quietly between the three of them: Jon, Hathaway, Ibarra; the way you tend a fire with multiple logs. She thought about blades, and what it did to a person to use one, and hoped none of them would have to find out tonight. It accumulated, was the thing. Not like a wound but like radiation exposure, the slow kind, the kind that didn't announce itself until the damage was already structural. There was no instrument built for measuring what got spent in the dark and never came back.

Jon's eyes swept the area the guards, the perimeter and then double checked what he saw. he turned to Kate and the others, "Kate and I will take out the guards." He saw Ibarra's look, "We'll stun then at close range. Ibarra you and Hathaway wait here, watch our backs. When you see us take care of the guards you come. Don't run, don't hesitate just walk with a purpose."

They crossed the open ground together, Kate matching Jon's pace, each step placed with the particular care of someone who has learned what noise costs. The sentries had not moved. Up close, Kate's target was larger than the distance had suggested. She slung the rifle across her back without a sound and pulled the hand-phaser.

She watched Jon in the corner of her eye. Waited.

She grabbed the Klingon by the back of the skull, fingers twisting into the coarse hair, and forced the emitter past his lips and against the back of his throat in the same motion. His eyes cracked open. The discharge filled his mouth with a red-orange glow that pushed out through the gaps in his teeth and lit his cheeks from the inside. His whole body seized, spine going rigid, arms snapping outward, and she threw her weight against him from behind to pin him to the chair, her chin against his skull, her forearm locked across his sternum as the heat climbed fast under her sleeve. A wet, pressurized sound built in his chest and she drove her shoulder into the back of his head to kill it. Steam pushed from both nostrils in short hard bursts. She held the emitter down and counted and held it down past the count.

She let him go. He had the specific quality of stillness that did not reverse.

She got her arms under his and took the full dead weight of him and moved backward in short tight steps, jaw clenched, boots finding the ground softly, the drag of his heels across the dirt a sound she kept as close to nothing as she could manage. At the grate she went down onto both knees and worked him in feet-first, feeding him into the dark by degrees, shifting her grip as his center of mass changed, until the last of him was inside. She set the cover back one edge at a time and pressed it level with the ground. She stood. She checked her hands. She looked at Jon.

Jon moved with deliberate swiftness. There was no wasted movement. He moved with preciseness. He came up behind his guard, his target and grabbed a handful of coarse Klingon hair. His phaser out. he pushed forward. his knee in the guard back, the phaser pressed against his neck as he pressed the trigger. On medium stun at close range the result was deadly. The glow spread down his neck, overloading the nervous system as it couldn't handle the sudden energy poured into it. The guard jerked, once twice and went still. He never uttered a sound.

He wrapped his arms around the guards waist and dragged him back into the brush where he unceremoniously dumped him. he covered the body with fallen tree limbs. Then picked up a stick and went back and wiped away the imprints of where the guard was dragged away.

Near the tree line, Hathaway watched the dark. He could make out Jon and Kate moving low and deliberate, handling the sentries with the practiced economy of people who had done this before. Ibarra was beside him. He did not look at her directly. The phaser on stun at that range was not a clean thing, and she did not need to know that yet. He had backed this team without reservation and he did not regret it, but the ground they were standing on was a different kind of ground than it had been an hour ago. Klingons had a way of doing that to a plan.

"Looks like they made us an opening," he said quietly, and waited for Ibarra to move.

Ibarra and Hathaway came across the open ground. Kate watched them arrive and did not say anything. She looked at Jon and waited. The city gate stood ahead of them, and behind them the ground was settled and quiet, and what had happened there was already becoming the kind of thing you did not discuss, only carried.

As they came together, Ibarra looked around quietly. This was not the sort of thing she was typically part of. She was well practiced in the arts of self-defense, but she had only had to use that training while she was at the Academy, and since then, only in the safety of the gymnasium or in a dojo. Once or twice she remembered doing something somewhat like this on the holodeck, but she had to remember that serving on a ship like the Washington meant combat, not just quiet duty. She had a look of focus as she looked at Kate and Cmdr Grayson.

************

When the team split into its smaller units, Viviana took up a position in the middle of her group, allowing Wyatt and Vi to take lead while Phoenix was rearguard. She was a bit nervous having to be armed. She was a doctor after all. She saved lives, she didn't go around harming people. But she understood that this was part of being in StarFleet. Sometimes she was going to have to do things she didn't feel comfortable with. She wondered what the first encounter with the Klingons would be like. This was going to be something intense.

James remained quiet and vigilant as he usually did on tactical missions. Part of him was glad to be grouped with his present company as it wasn't often he got to work with the Steele's. He admired their work and often hoped that he might do a similar job one day, assuming it didn't interfere with his command aspirations in the far future.

Of course, Phoenix enjoyed working with Jon's group as well. It was just nice to have a change of pace every once and a while. However, something didn't seem right. Not with the group, but their surroundings. It felt quiet. Too quiet. This didn't sit right. You would think there would be raining down hellfire since they were supposed to be dealing with rogue Klingons from a Great House what was considered to be one of the most dangerous in the Klingon Empire.

Wyatt scanned the area, it was quiet. The singing, yelling and carousing was over and done and the camp was quiet. The Klingons slept falsely secure in the belief that they were safe and that no one dare invade their camp. He turned back to the group. "Camp is quiet, nothing moving. Their all drunk on bloodwine even the sentries are out cold. Vi, you're behind me then Viviana and James, you cover us. No shooting unless it is necessary. We don't want to draw attention to ourselves and get into a firefight with an enemy force that dwarfs us and waking up with hangovers."

"Aye" James said quietly before adjusting his position so he could provide better tactical cover for the team. He still didn't like how quiet it was.

"Sounds like we are operating like the Tal Shiar, moving swiftly and silently. Good thing I have some practical experience" Viviana said with a nervous chuckle.


TBC

 

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