Klingon Bird-of-Prey Streaking Past a Distant Galaxy — Print & Oil Painting

One line does most of the work. The wings run across the picture as a single straight bar from the upper left corner to the lower right, and the body, the head, the pods and the whole background are hung off that diagonal.

The ship is banked hard and coming towards us. Under each wing a long panel glows oxblood, ribbed and lit as though from inside, and at the tips sit the cannon housings with two white lamps apiece. The plating above is a dull olive laid in overlapping sections, and the forward head carries a circular port burning red at its centre inside a paler ring.

Everything around it is heat: rust, ember orange and a dirty gold banked in soft masses, with hard white stars showing through the thinner passages. Three things interrupt it. A small spiral galaxy sits low on the left, core bright and one arm legible. A bright arc of light crosses the lower right corner where something very large is catching a sun. And a single dark sphere hangs below the ship, unlit and unexplained.

Ships of this class are commanded rather than administered. In 2285 one of them ran down a small Federation science vessel on an order to disable it; the gunner did better than that and destroyed it outright, offered the excuse that it had been a lucky shot, and was executed on the spot by his own captain for losing him the prisoners he wanted. The bridge of a Bird-of-Prey is a small room, and that is roughly what it is like to work in one.

It sits in our Star Trek collection, next to the same silhouette laid flat across a red nebula and one of them backlit at sunrise.