"Contact Captain!"

"Contact, Captain!" I said. My mouth was suddenly dry and my persistent erection rapidly became nothing more than a swiftly fading pleasant memory.

Captain Lance sensed the trace of the gut-wrenching fear I truly felt leaking through my calm facade. She barked "With what, Ensign?"

"Sensors indicate it's a Galaxy Class vessel: But Captain, it's call signs say 'I.S.S. Justice'..." and everyone else in the room gasped.

I.S.S. some of the most frightening letters in the Roman alphabet to anyone in star-fleet. They stand for Imperial Star Ship, and we are not talking about the Klingons. There are other universes, just a hair's breadth from our own, were Nazi Germany decisively WON world war two, without resorting to nuclear weapons. It began the Terran Imperium and conquered the Vulcans, Andorrans, and Romulans and a dozen other races. In some of those universes, it was in turn conquered by an alliance of the Cardassians and Klingons but in a few... Let's just say that Star Fleet has spies in several universes where the Terran Imperium is still going strong, and we are quite convinced that they've done the same to us.

The people of the Terran Imperium are, unaccountably, often JUST LIKE US, down to our very DNA, but utterly backward personality wise. Where we (though Star Fleet is considered by many in the Federation High Command to be a constructive use of those with what modern federation civilians would consider an insane degree of aggressiveness) are relatively calm and considered in our actions the Imperials are outright SAVAGES. Advancement in their command structure is highly political, and officers who fail in their duties are routinely assassinated by their own subordinates to afford those same subordinates better chances at rising in rank. (How that works, with the same DNA profiles emerging in future generations when some of the parents would have been dead before their children could be conceived has never been adequately explained...)

And here we were, a heavily retrofitted and upgraded Excelsior Class, up against an Imperial GALAXY, which is far more heavily armed than the federation's own...

"Captain, they're scanning and Hailing Us!" Ensign Amasova exclaimed.

The Captain didn't turn a hair, which I admired. For all that she had blanched when I told her what we faced she was now stoic and confident, every line radiating power and authority. "On Screen Ensign."