Star Trek: The voyages of the USS Apollo

Chapter Thirty Eight: A Society of Lies and Hate

October 1st 2413

"Rear Admiral's Log: Star Date 390249.813. Three years, one month, two weeks and five days ago we had a terrifying encounter with the True Way in the Badlands. An encounter in which they used the Iconian Sphere to create the wormhole that brought us to the Gamma Quadrant. Now we are going to the place where their descendants dwell. The Cardassian Empire has developed a ship called "The Supernova". A doomsday machine that is powered by an actual star and renders planets uninhabitable by blasting energy from the star at the planet. The Cardassian Empire plan to use this weapon in an attack on Bajor as revenge for both the Bajoran Revolution and the Dominion War. The fleet sent to find us were attacked by the Supernova and suffered severe damage. Starfleet Command has of course ordered us to stop this weapons by any means necessary and acceptable by Starfleet regulations. To do that, we are going to use one of the runnabouts on the Romulan Republic Warbird Ravon to sneak up to New Cardassia Prime and steal the designs. Hopefully this mission will go well."

New Cardassia Prime was a large planet indeed. Just a small percentage bigger than Cardassia Prime it had a similar ecosystem and breathable air. But it was also heavily developed, as evident by the many cities all across the planet. Megacities stretched across entire peninsulas and continents and were all visible from space itself. In orbit above the planet with a mild and humid climate was a fleet of twenty Cardassian warships with a single massive ship flying above them. This ship was twice the size of the famous Galaxy-class ship Enterprise and was a fear inducing sight indeed. The Supernova was not shaped like many other Cardassian ships, in fact, it wasn't much of a ship at all, but a palace! The Supernova was in fact an asteroid, the size of a whole city! The top of the asteroid contained a huge dome with a palace underneath it and soldiers throughout the palace that was a coliseum shaped building with a large dome on top. No doubt the Emperor's palace. At the front was a cannon that was glowing a terrifying orange light. It was easy to guess that the star that powered it was right behind the cannon and could fire at any moment. That is if the Captain chose to fire it. All across the Supernova were phaser banks and torpedo cannons that could devastate an entire planet without the help of the main cannon. Or "The Sun Gun" as the Cardassians called it.

As Rear Admiral Ethan Rivers gazed at the Supernova from one of the runnabout's small windows, he wondered how many people it took to build it. Was it hundreds? Was it thousands? Or perhaps even millions? There was in truth no way of knowing, the only answer was pure speculation. He couldn't help but admit that he was also a bit impressed that the Empire had built their ship into an entire asteroid. The cloaked runnabout continued to fly past the Cardassian Fleet at thruster speed so as to not be detected. They had entered the system as full impulse and now were at full thrusters to prevent being detected by the Cardassian ships that looked exactly like the ones back in the Alpha Quadrant. When Captain Jakoro, Captain Anaya and the rest of the Acadian refugees back in the Fleet first joined up with the Apollo, Ethan and the rest of his senior officers learned that the Cardassian Empire had not advanced their technology at all unless it was necessary to their plans of Galaxy wide domination. Ethan had suspected the ships to be highly advanced warships that could destroy a whole fleet of ships in mere moments and could conquer the Federation within hours. But he was wrong. They were still the same old Galdor-Class ships that the Federation had fought against like there was no tomorrow during the Dominion War. Although this made it easier for the now combined fleet of ships to fight three or four Cardassian Imperial ships, it did not change the fact that there were many more ships in the Cardassian Imperial Guard. For in the words of Captain Marcus Kimball "When fighting an enemy with more powerful ships, have more ships. For more ships overwhelms them". Ethan of course agreed with Captain Kimball's words. Even though these ships would now be considered outdated, they were still a formidable force as there were now many of them and all of them were ready for a full blown invasion into the Alpha Quadrant.