USS Kelvin Fleeing the Narada's Shadow — Print & Oil Painting

Debris first. Small dark fragments are scattered right across the width of the frame, tumbling at every angle, some close enough to read as torn plating and some reduced to specks. Whatever has already happened here, it happened to something large.

The light source is a white and orange blaze at the centre left, low over the curve of a rust-coloured world, throwing rays up through thin cloud. Silhouetted against it hangs the other ship: a black mass of spines and hooked arms with a long thin line dropping away beneath it, a shape that shares no vocabulary at all with the vessel below.

That vessel is at the lower left, running, blue engine light streaming behind her, painted brightest where she is furthest from the blast. She is small in the frame and the composition never lets her become the hero of it.

The attacking ship had come through a singularity out of a century that had not happened yet, which is why nothing about it made sense to the crew watching it arrive. Her captain went across and did not come back; her first officer held the conn for twelve minutes, ordered the evacuation, and got more than eight hundred people clear. Part of our Star Trek collection, and Narada Emerging from a Swirling Black Hole shows the arrival that started it.