Lokath Targesh

Lieutenant Lokath, son of Drahk, of House Targesh is a Starfleet Officer, currently serving as the Assistant Chief Science Officer aboard the USS Phoenix, a Yorktown-Class Exploring Ship.

## Early Life

On Qo’nos, just as April turned to May, Lokath was born among blood and death. Due to unforeseen complications during his birth, his mother, who will remain nameless, died of blood loss after having refused medical help. She would not be dishonored by being sedated after all. Because of this, his father, Drahk, of house Targesh, always held the boy in contempt among his older siblings. From his earliest youth, Lokath was small and scrawny, seemingly unfit to be a proper Klingon Warrior, but the young boy was diligent and competitive, always taking on bigger and stronger opponents. Of course, he would lose most of his bouts with his brothers and sisters, yet he never gave up, wanting nothing more than to prove his father’s opinion of him was wrong. Little did he know, he would never have a chance to do so.

A few years before his rite of Ascension, a bloody conflict erupted with another family from a rival House. His father, and a majority of his siblings died in honorable battle, but by the most improbable of happenstance, Lokath managed to survive. The conflict just so happened to coincide with the arrival of a Starfleet ship in orbit just over the small warzone, a Diplomatic envoy from the Federation to the Klingon world of Qo’nos to replace the ailing ambassador that had been stationed on the planet for a long time now. Witnessing the conflict on the planet’s surface, a team of Starfleet medical officers was beamed down, and they brought the injured to their medical bay, including the unconscious Lokath.

Waking up in a Starfleet vessel was a strange experience to the teenager. There was so much light, so many aliens, strange looking and pale. He sat up, ready to fight and die if needed against those intruders, but the sedative he had been given clouded his mind, and he fell back on the biobed, fully conscious but too tired to move. This, once again, turned out to be a boon considering his previous injuries. Being the first of the injured to wake up, Lokath had the honored responsibilities of explaining what had happened to the First Officer of the vessel, a certain Commander Rilok, a pointy-eared, serious looking Vulcan. After a long discussion, and finding out about the almost full extinction of his family, the young Klingon knew he had nowhere to go on Qo’nos. Instead of dying honorably in battle, he had survived and lost, a coward’s fate. With this in mind, the young boy petitioned the Starfleet officer so that he could remain on board of the ship, a request that was at first refused, but after some insistence, and some support from other officers who were not prone to only listen to logic and reason, Lokath was given a chance to be brought back to Earth at the end of the Ship’s months-long voyage.

Lokath used this time well, having been assigned a small quarter on the civilians deck : he attended classes, learning so differently than he had on Qo’nos, where everything was a competition. He quickly got a grasp of the English language, even though he still speaks with a thick accent to this day, and he was surprised to see how well he was accepted by the other child and teens that were approximately the same age as he was. He would get visits from Rilok almost daily, and the Officer often quizzed the Klingon on what he had learned that day, as well as the previous studies he had gone through. While the boy had no idea what would happen to him when they reached Earth, he was surprised to learn, a few days before their arrival to the Human’s homeworld, that Commander Rilok had decided to take him under his wing, despite all logic and reasoning dictating this would be quite an unusual thing to do. With renewed hope, Lokath left the ship with Rilok for a few months while the Vulcan was off duty, and he learned many things from the older man. Rilok had never married, and never had children of his own despite his now advancing age. Before being trained in Command, he had been a science officer, serving on many ships during his long tenure in Starfleet before being offered the post of First Officer aboard the Triumphant, the ship that had rescued Lokath from his certain death.

As he grew within this strange and unusual new family, the Klingon grew, both in height and in intelligence and passion, and with his adopted father’s guidance, developed a love for sciences and space exploration. Instead of going through the Rite of Ascension, he instead learned to be mindful of his emotions, to be calm and introspective. Of course, the Klingon would never fully be able to suppress all of his emotion as Vulcans do, but this training proved quite useful during the young man’s further studies. When he came of age, and with Rilok’s now well-earned letter of recommendation, Lokath applied to Starfleet Academy. The entrance exam was an eye-opener as to the hardship he would have to go through to succeed in Starfleet, but with the previous help he had received from Rilok and the other officers aboard the Triumphant, the Klingon pulled through by the skin of his neck, and was accepted in the Cadet training program.

## Starfleet Academy

His life at the academy was just, if not more eventful as the one he had left behind on the Triumphant. Being much taller and larger than a majority of the students in his class, Lokath stood out like a sore thumb, but the other students soon learned there was more than met the eyes when it came to the Klingon. While his first year was awkward, he soon made many acquaintances, friends, some enemies of course, and even a short-lived fling with a human girl, which died off soon enough due to him prioritizing his studies over anything else. Over time, and after many generic classes in different types of sciences, Lokath finally picked his specialization : geophysics. The studies of planets and their dynamics and formation entranced the always curious Klingon, and even after finally graduating from Starfleet Academy after four long years, he decided to further his studies while serving in Starfleet.

## Starbase 277

After applying to many different postings which seemed interesting, Lokath was quite happy to learn that his first choice, a space station orbiting a Class Y planet, or as some of the Officers called a “Demon” planet. Aboard the station, Lokath worked with the rest of the Science department in taking surveys of the planet, using many different kinds of probes as proxies since they could not physically go on the planet themselves. As time went by, the young science officer was given a few smaller projects to lead, and he even wrote his Master’s thesis on the effects of Tectonic plates shifts around a planet’s core, and their possible ramifications on creating a Class Y planet.

## USS Deynonychus

Of course, Lokath was not satisfied with a mere Master’s degree, and with Rilok’s encouragement, decided to push himself even further and attempt to obtain a PhD. He applied to a new posting, this time on a Science vessel so that he could study a large variety of different Planet classes instead of this one, albeit very interesting, class Y planet. Aboard this new ship, Lokath worked with a small team of fellow students and officers, studying the different planets and other planetary bodies they encountered, often joining away teams on their planet-side missions. Of course, it helped that, as a Klingon, Lokath was quite apt at defending himself should the need arise, but his primary focus always was on his own work. Lokath spent many years leading this team, through the obtention of his Doctorate, and then simply as an Officer of Starfleet, and while he saw many of his friends and fellow officer come and go along the years, the Klingon was fiercely loyal to this ship, and thus stayed on board until the aging vessel was finally decommissioned in 2477. Now almost dawning on his fortieth year of age, according to the Starfleet calendar at least, the Klingon applied to an open position that had seemed quite interesting, as Assistant Chief Science Officer aboard a Yorktown ship, the Phoenix.