Klingon Bird-of-Prey Fleet Approaching Earth — Print & Oil Painting

A ring of red light is set into the side of the forward hull, and at this angle it reads as an eye. The head it belongs to is a plated ovoid carried forward and down on a short neck, turned very slightly away from us, and the rest of the ship appears to be following wherever that light is pointed.

Behind the head the vessel opens out. Long shallow wings run from the body to a weapon pod at each tip, the upper surfaces armoured in mottled olive and grey, the undersides carrying a deep oxblood panel that picks up the star burning at the right edge. Five more ships of the same pattern are scattered through the frame at four different depths, one crossing high and near, one low, the furthest reduced to a dark chevron with two lights on it.

The world they are closing on fills the left half of the picture: white cloud dragged in long spirals over deep blue ocean, a suggestion of green land showing under the weather, a hard bright terminator running down the face of it. Nothing in the image has the roughness of paint. Surfaces, cast shadows and the softening of the far hulls all belong to a modelled and lit render rather than to a brush.

One ship of this class did reach that planet, and it arrived under new management. A Starfleet crew took it off a Klingon commander at Genesis, renamed it after a famous mutiny, rode it back to 1986 to collect two humpback whales, and put it down in San Francisco Bay hard enough that it sank. Six of them arriving in the ordinary way would have made a much shorter story. From our Star Trek collection, beside the same class holding formation over a green world and a single hull cruising a deep blue void.