January
Sol
Carter's start to the new-year was proving to be less than positive. The huge complex of 32 civilian mining facilities based on Hyperion had just reported the exhaustion of the final vein of Duranium. With no further TN minerals available the whole complex was being shut down ready for deployment elsewhere.
Whilst the Federation had not been buying the minerals the tax receipts and wider income from supporting the complex had been a major revenue earner for both the Federation and Carter's conglomerate. The loss of revenues was yet another blow for an already overstretched budget.
The Federation was still running a huge deficit and it would be only a matter of years before there would need to be a massive contraction in industrial output, ship building and research in order to rebalance the finances. That was going to hurt Carter's own interests horribly given his reliance on lucrative government contracts.
For Carter then the loss of income from Hyperion was the final straw. The only way he was going to maintain the long term viability of his conglomerate was if the Federation had more winning wars against some of the other known Empires.
Unfortunately the relationship with the Caleb was looking as strong as ever. So far the team he had dispatched had made no discernible progress in identifying political stress points with the Caleb's ruling party that might result in an aggressive stance being taken against the Federation. Carter was sure that, with the threat of the Chigs, only a very aggressive act against the Federation creating a more immediate and serious threat would spur them to action.
Fortunately, after several months of hard work, Carter thought he had found the solution. The Kunming Commonwealth remained a highly aggressive but non expansive empire who had been largely left alone by the Federation since first contact over six years ago.
Although Carter had limited intelligence on them it appeared that they had a significant but smaller economy than the Federation and were substantially less advanced in technological developments. Hence whilst the location of their home world meant a potential enemy laying between the critical junction between Sol and the colonies of Luyten and Delta Trianguli it appeared to him that the military considered this an acceptable risk because of their assumed ability to quickly deal with any aggressive acts.
Carter had therefore concluded that the Kunming’s acquisition of the Federation's most advanced technologies would quickly spurt the Federation to action against them. All he therefore needed to do was engineer their apparent capture of Federation technologies in order to tip the balance to war. Whilst he knew it would stretch the Navy he thought the war would be reasonably short and was an acceptable risk in exchange for securing the longer term revenue streams for his business.
It was certainly a difficult situation to arrange, especially whilst also making sure the ultimate source of the events remained undetected, however with the recent diplomatic actions with the Caleb Carter had found a way to do it, It was certainly risky for him but then again he hadn't made the money he had today without taking some serious risks. It was therefore more with anticipation than trepidation that he decided to put his plan in action.
GJ 1065 – Deep Space
A series of warning claxons sounding sent the bridge crew of the TFS Borneo into an immediate frenzy of activity. Across the ship the crew scrambled to reach their stations whilst automated systems began to close down the ship’s compartments.
“Exo, report” barked Lieutenant Commander Aiden Coleman, the captain of the ship.
“Sir, we’ve got an internal master alarm failure alert triggered from engineering. Damage control is showing engine Charlie 1 offline; we are venting plasma along the lower lateral thrust array, stabilisers are correcting but our thermal emissions just spiked”.
A few moments later the Exo gave a further update. “I’m getting reports in from engineering now; looks like we had another significant failure on the primary fuel injector manifold array. Safeties tripped an emergency shut down and system purge. We should stop venting in the next minute once the main chamber has fully emptied”.
“Ok, let’s bring us down to condition 2. What’s the status on getting that engine back up and running?” asked Coleman.
“Well if it’s the same issue as we had on Alpha2 last month I’d estimate at least 8 hours to allow time for the parts to cool down enough for the team to access them and for the fabricator to extrude the new parts. If it’s the same parts as before that’s also going to leave us with less than a couple of hundred litres of extrusion composite for use on the printer” replied the Exo.
“Ok, Comms please inform Commodore Barnett that we’ve had another engine failure and will be unable to match fleet speed for at least 10 hours. Also inform him that we will need to impose on him further for a transfer of extrusion composite to top up our maintenance supplies”.
Coleman sat back in his chair. Yet another significant failure was going to put his crew even more on edge. The grind of the long term picket duty was sapping enough but the increasing frequency of failures on all the vessels in the task groups was becoming an increasing concern. Some of the ships were fast approaching their approved deployment times so it would not be long before they would need to start rotating ships off of the front line. He could only hope that the shake down training for the new vessels was going to plan and they would soon be ready to take their place.
In the mean-time he made a mental note to seek out the engineering crew responsible for the engine refit on the Borneo once he was back at Mars. Even since the upgrade had been performed he had been plagued with problems from the new engines and he was minded to give them some direct feedback on their performance.
GJ 1065 – Federation dig site
Foster was back where she enjoyed being most – up to her neck in piles of old machinery deep in the heart of the Federation’s archaeological dig. Her latest small project was the reclamation of an ordnance factory, one of the facilities the Government had identified as a priority for recovery back to Luyten.
Having been working on the facility for the past two weeks the team was now in a position to run a final diagnostic on the fabrication components before packing them away. Over the past two years Foster had helped to develop a comprehensive and largely automated cycle which only required a hundred kilos of composite TN material to run.
The test effectively ran a single miniature batch cycle of components from the assembly array to show the start to finish process was working as intended. However, with the micro size components and the limited run, it took only a platoon of her men to run the process rather than a full workforce. With the tests completed the main engineering group could then move into to start dismantling the components, ready for shipping back to Luyten.
With so many installations now successfully tested, uplifted and transported off-world for use, the whole process was now very slick and pretty much always worked smoothly to plan. Foster was therefore very surprised when she received an agitated call early the next morning from the skeleton crew asking her to make her way back to the installation as soon as possible.
Half an hour later she was back in the main assembly line building, still trying to scrub the last of the sleep from her eyes whilst she strode towards the gaggle of men milling about the end of the line.
“Ok Lieutenant, perhaps you can let me know what all the excitement is over?” inquired Foster.
The young lieutenant turned about at the sound of Foster’s voice and gave a smart salute.
“Well ma’am, as I mentioned on the comm I thought this was something best seen by you straight away. Men, if you would be so kind, would you make some space for the Colonel so she can see what’s been happening overnight”.
Around him, the other engineers peeled away from the production line to reveal a small, neatly stacked pile of missile components.
Foster’s pace faltered somewhat when she saw the batch.
“Lieutenant, would that my any chance be the test run batch we put on yesterday evening?” asked Foster.
“It is indeed ma’am” replied the Lieutenant with a broad grin on his face. “We were not keeping a supper close eye on the process given how we have the thing set up to run but as far as we can tell it completed the full batch of components near enough three hours faster than it should have been capable of doing. I’ve had the team going over the logs for the last half hour and as far as we can work out this factory is using some form of pre-curing process on the extruded alloys. That looks to be setting the alloy enough to allow for final forming and finishing but leaving it far more malleable such that the whole process is hugely accelerated”.
Foster’s own grin matched that of the Lieutenant. “If that’s the case we may have stumbled on a pretty simple process enhancement that’s going to speed up ordnance production across the whole of the Federation. Ok, let’s get the full team back down here, I want another test batch run but with a full set of analytics running and close monitoring to confirm what we have found before we get too excited about it. Get those test components over the main research station as well, I want them tested to failure to make sure this process is introducing some sort of fault that will come back to bite us later on”.
When the team didn’t move immediately, Foster clapped her hands together. “Come on team, that means we need to get going right away. The longer you spend mucking around confirming this the less time I’m going to have to buy you all a celebratory drink”.
As the men scrambled to obey Foster turned to the young Lieutenant. “And you are coming with me straight away; you can explain to governor how you might have just found a way to up our production by the best part of 25% and saved our bods back on Earth nearly three years of research to boot”.
Foster smiled a she watched the Lieutenant’s face pale.
Mars - low orbit
Shaw was back at the main Mars shipyards working through the latest plans for the continued expansion of their production capabilities. The engineers had just completed an additional slipway for two of the destroyer yards and were immediately starting work on further expansion.
At the current rate of expansion that would put them in a position to construct two full squadrons of destroyers concurrently which would be a huge step forward in Naval capacity.
The government had also signed off on the expansion of the two carrier shipyards to enable them to build vessels of up to 36,000 tons. Whilst there were currently no plans in place for such huge vessels Shaw was relishing the prospect of starting the planning and design for what would be the Federation’s largest vessels.
With several frigate slipways also being expanded Shaw could only marvel at the pace of development he had been allowed to implement. Quite aside from the sterling investment it represented such a level of expansion could have only been dreamt of no more than a few years back when the Earth’s dwindling supply of Neutronium had meant they were not even able to retool for newer designs, let alone expanding the facilities. As far as Shaw was concerned, the investment in Delta Parvonis had more than aid for itself and the vital work of those miners was more than worthy of a medal.
The only downside to the continued expansion was the ever increasing piles of paper he had to deal with juggling the millions of construction workers, support staff and material flows to keep it all working smoothly. It was however a reasonable price to pay.
Luyten – Kingston ground force training complex
Standing back on the main parade ground, Brigadier Jamie Crawford watched on as the Federation’s newest Division Headquarters completed their passing out parade. After an extended training program the Unionists had proven to be just as capable at command and control as they were with combat duties. Whilst still nervous about the ongoing growth of the Union military he was also hugely proud that his training wing had been able to prove to many of the wider military brass that it was possible to train the locals to an equally capable standard.
In fact, as well as being the first Union HQ unit the team would soon be taking command of four human brigade HQs currently on their way from Earth’s own training camps making the Division they would lead the Federation’s first ever multi-racial fighting force. He could only hope that the professionalism of the troops would help to minimise the inevitable friction that was going to arise initially.
Luyten – Central command
For Admiral Catherine Miller the news of Foster’s recent breakthrough in ordnance production could not have come at a better time. Although the local ordnance factories had recently been able to complete a new batch of 1,000 Stirge Mk6 anti-missile missiles the next batch of Harpy Mk6 anti-ship missiles were going to take months to produce and would most likely be fully used just filling the empty magazines of the cruisers currently completing their shake down training.
Whilst Luyten did have good stock of missiles many of these were now close to obsolete as the successive improvements in engine technology rendered them ineffectual. Miller was therefore pushing hard for the release of further funds and industrial capacity to further expand local ordnance production both to help meet local demand and also to reduce her reliance on the long fragile supply lines back to earth.
Fortunately it looked like Admiral Shots shared her views and was now also pushing for further military spending to bolster the local fleets supplies. Not for the first time Miller pondered again the continued focus on missile based vessels given the increasing strain they were placing on the Federation’s infrastructure.
February
Luyten
With the turn of the month Miller was feeling somewhat happier. Her requests for additional ordnance facilities had finally been approved and the Treasury had given authorisation for the phased construction of a further 100 facilities to be built over the course of the next two years. In addition a further heavy lift group was being diverted from Sol to help accelerate the transport of recovered facilities from GJ 1065. Combined, these would substantially increase their ordnance output and should help to start stockpiling munitions for the inevitable war with the Chigs.
On top of that the low orbit shipyards had just informed her of the completion of the first of the new Type 161 (J) scout corvettes.
Type 161 (J) class Corvette 3,000 tons 290 Crew 893 BP TCS 60 TH 500 EM 0
8333 km/s JR 1-50 Armour 2-18 Shields 0-0 Sensors 70/70/0/0 Damage Control Rating 3 PPV 0
Maint Life 6.4 Years MSP 558 AFR 24% IFR 0.3% 1YR 23 5YR 352 Max Repair 360 MSP
J3200(1-50) Military Jump Drive Max Ship Size 3200 tons Distance 50k km Squadron Size 1
MCF Drive E5 (4) Power 125 Fuel Use 50% Signature 125 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 155,000 Litres Range 186.0 billion km (258 days at full power)
Active Search Sensor MR201-R16 (1) GPS 5760 Range 201.6m km Resolution 16
Thermal Sensor TH5-70 (1) Sensitivity 70 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 70m km
EM Detection Sensor EM5-70 (1) Sensitivity 70 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 70m km
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposesWith both significant passive sensor suites and jump engines the new scouts would be able to move through systems without reliance on other vessels and should substantially improve the scouting capacity of the Federation.
Given that the shps were designed to stay well away from any form of combat Miller was happy to immediately instruct their captains to break orbit and head for GJ 1065 for rapid forward deployment if needed. In the mean-time, the rapidly growing maintenance facilities would allow them to stay on station around the colony without any issues.
The only real blight for her was the painfully slow progress being made by both the cruiser and light cruiser groups currently on shake down training. Both were taking far longer than planned to fully train up and despite some judicious redeployment of captains they remained stubbornly slow. Infuriatingly no one as yet could identify just why it was taking so long.
The knock on impact was that her two task groups on picket duty in GJ1065 were fast running out of both maintenance supplies and morale from such a long stint in deep space. Unfortunately, with her other carrier group also still trying to retrain the replacement wings of fighters and no prospect of Earth releasing it’s one remaining carrier group, she had no choice but to keep them hanging on for a while longer yet.
Mars – low orbit
Back on-board the Naval yard’s Shaw had just received the similarly good news that the next two Type 323 Destroyer escorts had just rolled off the slips and had immediately broken orbit to commence work up training. The destroyers would form a key part of the area defence network for the new carrier strike groups so their production marked another step towards the formation of the first carrier strike group.
Two further area defence destroyers had immediately been ordered and construction on those would begin in a matter of days. As was tradition with the Navy, the names of the vessels had already been selected - Zanzibar and Zimbabwe. What was different was this marked the end of the Federation’s original naming convention of using all of the Earth’s old country names as a mark of the solidarity of the Federation and in memory of the word from which the Federation had been born.
Arguments as to what the new naming convention should be had already started to reach fever pitch with more than one scuffle breaking out in the various messes - an inevitable result of the mix of strong differing opinions and alcohol. For Shaw however he wasn’t too fussed, just as long as they continued to build them and let him get on with his job of building a force capable of taking on the Chigs.
85 Pegasi – Caleb capital
“Boss, are you awake? There’s something I think you better come take a look at”.
The tone in Simpson’s voice was enough to bring Naomi quickly out of the light sleep she had been in. Years of training and time working in special ops meant it took her only a few moments to shake off the effects and she was already rolling out of bed to pull on a pair of fatigues by the time she replied.
“I’m up, what’s the situation?”
“Not too sure; Isabella started picking up some unusual coms traffic about five minutes ago. It might just be something else we haven’t seen yet but we thought it better to keep you in the loop just in case”.
A minute later Naomi and Nathan Simpson were down in the basement of the residence that the Republic of Caleb had given them as a temporary embassy. The building was a fairly rambling old property that sat closer to the suburbs than the city centre. Whilst it made the transport and security details a real headache for the wider team it suited Naomi and her team down to the ground as a reasonably unobtrusive base of operations.
“Boss, something’s definitely up” stated Isabella as they walked through the door. “They are using a new encryption which we’ve not seen before so no idea what they are saying but that link into the traffic net we managed to get installed last week is showing re-direction markers in this whole area. As far as I can see they are clearing traffic for at least four blocks from around the property. There’s also some priority routing going on in the city around a couple of military units. They are only changing the signalling at the last minute so I can’t see their destination but the paranoid in me says they are headed our way”.
“Ok, assuming those units are on route what’s their ETA and what’s the status of the Diplo team, Isaac and Lauren?” replied Naomi.
Isabella worked for a few moments before replying. “Hard to get an accurate estimate but I would say 15 to 20 mins max. The whole of the Diplo team are safely tucked up in their beds. Isaac is in the sack and we have Lauren on perimeter duty as part of the wider sentry duty roster”.
“Right, I’m assuming that there has been no indication that any of our recent activities have been detected so we won’t know if it’s a direct response or something else. However I don’t see any good reason for us to hang around and find out if you are right about that. We can lay low for a day and if it all proves to be a bit of a misunderstanding on our part then no big deal. We should probably kick the Diplos out with us as well though just in case it’s a ruse to try and flush us out as it will be an easier cover story if we run as a drill for them.
Nathan, go grab Lauren and the two of you get down to the vehicle bay and prep the ground vehicles for a quick exit. Isabella, pack your smeg up and be ready to move in five mins. I’m going to go wake up Isaac and the Diplos and explain to them what’s going on. We will re-group in the garage in ten”.
Naomi was almost finished speaking when an alert flashed across Isabella’s screen.
“Ah crap, we are definitely in trouble. They’ve just blocked the main coms line with the jump gate Ansible and as far as the AI can tell they’ve also sent weapons release codes to the task group trailing our salvagers” responded Isabella.
“Right, bin that plan, this just became an immediate ex-fill. Bring the basics and set the charges down here. RV in the garage is now in five, we need to hustle before they close us down here. I’m going to drag Isaac and the Diplos out of their beds right now. Oh and Isabella see if you can raise Captain Hewitt in that shoebox of his that he brought us in on, I want to know if there are any options on getting us the hell off of this planet” muttered Naomi.
Less than five minutes later Naomi’s full team was assembled in the garage along with Marcus Lyons’ somewhat drowsy diplomatic team.
“Boss, those military units are definitely headed our way. Traffic blocks are now fully in place in a six grid radius and they have shut off the low level airspace around the block as well. I get the impression they don’t want us leaving any time soon” said Isabella whilst she continued to input a stream of commands into her forearm mounted terminal.
“Now just what the hell is going on here?” demanded Marcus to Naomi. “You’ve dragged us out of bed in the middle of the night on the pretext of an urgent diplomatic message only to bustle us down in the garage of all places. I don’t know what your game is Corporal Shaw but when the lieutenant hears of this he is no doubt going to hang you out to dry for this ridiculous escapade of yours”.
“I’m sorry mister Lyons but I really don’t have time to fill you in on all the details. But in brief my actual rank is Commander and I lead the special security detachment that has been tasked with the protection of you and your team. Right now we believe there is an imminent threat to all of you and we are taking measures to see that doesn’t happen. So if you will please do exactly as you are told and nothing else we will see you to safety”.
Naomi had no intention of letting on the true full extent of her mission but adding an element of truth to any lie always made it more believable and would hopefully keep them compliant for as long as she needed them.
Naomi turned back to her team. “Well we’re not getting out in the diplomatic transports then. Looks like we will need to revert to the plain sight plan and hope the AI can manage to keep all of their monitoring systems fooled for long enough to get us out of their immediate lockdown. Isaac, Nathan, we better use the van. Isabella, get the AI set up to start infiltration”.
Isaac and Nathan quickly moved to the back of the garage where they started to pull a large canvas cover from a vehicle, revealing the unmistakeable shape of one of the Caleb police force’s metro enforcement vans.
“Where on earth did you get that thing from?” blurted Marcus, “and what the hell was that about an AI? Are you telling me your team is in possession of an unshackled AI system”?
“Probably best you don’t know where we got the van and other assets from; suffice to say we’ve been pretty busy since landing here a few months back making some contingency plans for a situation just like this. As to the AI, best if you speak nicely about Sid, he’s a Terradine 142 model from back in the 40s and just a mite bit sensitive to any disparaging remarks. Isabella has been working with Sid for months so I’m very confident we are not going to have a containment issue.
Now, we have a number of military units inbound so if you would please hurry up and get your arses on the back of the van we will be leaving very shortly” responded Naomi.
A few minutes later, with all ten of them crammed into the van, they slid out from the garage and onto the deserted streets.
“Ok, it looks like there are still a few streets where they don’t have physical road blocks in place as yet. I’d say they’ve been a little bit shoddy on their containment but just in case they are actually trying to funnel and break outs I’m going to take us towards the city for a few blocks to get out of the cordon before looping back ground and heading for the primary safe house” stated Naomi as she continued to frantically input instructions.
Naomi gritted her teeth. As much as she had been decisive with Marcus, she wasn’t at all sure about their ability to really contain the AI and prevent either a propagation event or the Caleb being able to isolate an instance of the coding. They were taking an awful risk and using the AI far more then she would otherwise like, especially given the historic twitchy nature of the 142 series.
Above them, several drones swept into their vicinity, scanning the van and interrogating its’ core. Almost all of the passengers subconsciously held their breath as the glaring lights of the drones tracked over the bulk of the van. However, moments later they sped off again, apparently happy with the AI’s responses.
It wasn’t until about five minutes later, with the van well outside of the cordon and Sid back in his box that the group started to relax somewhat. It would be about 15 minutes before they reached the first of the team’s safe houses where hopefully Naomi would have a better chance to assess the situation.
“Boss, you are going to want to take a look at feed 3” whispered Nathan in Naomi’s ear.
Flicking on her own wrist terminal, Naomi quickly brought up the set of live feeds from the embassy. Bursts of light and the staccato report of automatic weapons fire filled the screen and audio feedback loop. Although difficult to make it appeared that the Caleb had indeed deployed a military unit to take the embassy and judging by the weight of fire being laid down it would be only a short while before they overcame the remaining guards and stormed the building.
Having seen enough Naomi switch off her screen, already starting to think about the implications for her and her team and just what she would do next.
With her screen off Naomi turned back to Nathan. “Ok, blow the basement charges”.
85 Pegasi – Deep Space
Captain Hewitt was sat in his command chair keeping one eye on the latest survey point progress and another on the piles of paperwork he was also busily trying to catch up on. In recent weeks, with very little happening, he had taken more of the slower night shifts as an opportunity to try and once and for all catch up with his backlog.
Since dropping off the Diplomatic team their stay in the system had been largely uneventful. With the survey locations all sitting out-side of even the systems secondary star, they’d had no contact with any further Caleb vessels and aside from the occasional coms block, nothing but mundane system traffic control reports to listen into.
The regular check ins with the Diplomatic team were also starting to become more mundane and routine as the teams early successes gave way to the inevitable bureaucratic layers of government and the tedious work required to make even small steps in furthering their relations.
Hewitt therefore had only a muted response when his coms officer informed him of another signal drop out with the Caleb home world and a further failure of the jump gate Ansible.
“Ok, it’s nothing we haven’t seen on quite a few occasions now, keep an eye on it and make sure you re-establish coms links once we are back up and running. However let the coms officers on the salvage group know this has been a recurring issue and nothing to worry about. They’ve been in system for barely more than a day and are probably already fretting about the drop of signal”.
“Aye aye sir” responded the comms officer before turning back to his station.
With the latest small issue resolved Hewitt settled back in his chair, returning his attention to the backlog of paperwork.
He was therefore startled when, half an hour later, the ship’s general alert claxon sounded as alert messages started pouring onto his console. Turning rapidly to his warfare officer he bellowed for a report.
“Sir, we are detecting multiple class 24 impacts in the vicinity of the salvage group. Our links to the vessels are down but their last shared sensor sweep showed them be painted by multiple actives from the trailing Caleb task group”. The warfare officer paused for a few moments whilst he studied his console before continuing.
“Track updates are showing two new wrecks in the system and several groups of federation authenticated life pod signals. From what I can see the Calebs hit them with no warning. There aren’t that many pod signals, looks like very few of the crew made it to their escape chutes in time”.
Just then the comms officer piped up. “Sir, I’ve been continuing to try and hail the planet and re-establish the link with the Ansible but no luck to date. This is the longest they have ever been down”.
Hewitt almost lept out of his chair as he shouted back to the comms officer “Shut it down, shut it down now, you are broadcasting our location”.
The comms officer, looking aghast at his mistake, rushed to comply.
After a further quick appraisal of the situation Hewitt started issuing orders.
“Nav, lay in a plot to take us away from the survey zones and back round to the Gliese 2 gate but don’t get within a billion of anything. Warefare I want us running on nothing but passives from here on in and initiate emissions limitation procedures, we will run the engines at 75% to keep our thermals down as well. Comm, keep your ears peeled but do not respond to any messages without my express permission.
Everyone, we just found ourselves in the middle of some seriously hostile territory but we still have a job to do and our teams on the planet may well be relying on us to help them out. I want an O group in 45 mins with the senior officers. In the meantime set condition 2 and get us the hell away from this survey location”.
March
85 Pegasi – Caleb Home World
Naomi eased back into the rickety chair with an exhausted sigh. They were finally in what was hopefully a slightly longer term safe house. After more than three weeks of playing cat and mouse with the Caleb defence forces and security services it looked like they had finally managed to slip their net for the moment.
Few of them had had more than a few hours’ sleep a week for the whole of that time and she was well aware that all of her team were running on the ragged edge of their capacity to keep going so it was a huge relief to have a moment to pause. She just needed her team to get their heads down for a bit and get their energy back before they made any critical mistakes.
The chase had taken them close to a thousand miles across two continents, used 8 different vehicles, some planned and some stolen and resulted in the deaths of at least six Caleb police and a number of handlers they had previously recruited. Naomi wasn’t happy about their deaths but it meant they weren’t leaving anyone behind who could be interrogated for information so she reasoned it was really best for them anyway.
They had now found their way to a relatively remote hunting lodge deep in one of the largest woods on the planet. With autumn on them the hunting season was well and truly over so hopefully there would be far fewer civilians they needed to try and avoid. Hopefully that would give them some breathing space on what to do next and see if they could come up with some credible plan to get the hell off the rock.
Throughout the chase Naomi had kept Isabella working to find any reasoning behind the apparent unprovoked attack but to date she hadn’t been able to uncover anything. Marcus also wasn’t able to add anything to the question as, as afar as he was concerned, the diplomatic team had been making slow but good progress with their counterparts. He could only guess that some internal power struggle was happening in the Caleb senior ranks and that they were the unfortunately fallout from someone trying to force a point.
Interestingly, whilst public news channels had discussed an incident at their embassy there was no broader mention of issues or concerns with the Federation and they could hence only speculate whether there was any wider fallout from the actions and what if anything was happening out in space.
Unfortunately, what they had been able to unearth was the final sensor relays from the scout vessel and the salvagers to their secure data store on the planet. The sensor package showed the almost instant destruction of the salvage group and the few escape pods that survived the destruction. Naomi was just hoping that the lack of further information flow from the survey vessel was due to Hewitt having his wits about him rather than the Caleb managing to catch him to. Whatever the reason though she knew she could not rely on Hewitt for a rescue.
What Naomi desperately needed therefore was more information on what was happening and some way to get a message back to the Federation to let them know what was going on. As far as she was concerned her current contract was pretty much null and avoid so whoever wanted to keep her presence on the planet a secret could go spin; she just wanted to get out and as soon as possible.
Thankfully for her at least the diplomatic team had been able to hold it together and had even been helpful in getting them away from the cities and the security forces. Begrudgingly she had to admit that they were certainly made of sterner stuff than she originally expected.
With those thoughts still swirling through her mind, sleep finally claimed her.
Delta Trianguli
Administrator Benjamin Coles sat back in his office feeling particularly happy with himself. The bulk lift cargo group had just finished unloading over 90k tons of TN minerals from the previously overlooked civilian mining base in the system.
The transfer drastically improved the planet’s stocks of minerals and ensured it wold be capable of running its full industry at maximum output. What’s more it also made the planet strategically more important to the Federation and upped the chance of further local investment in both the military and civilian sectors; something he was keen to see after the large scale shift of focus to Luyten.
The only downside to the good news was Carter’s immediate sequestering of 12,500 tons of Duranium for shipping back to Earth in order to improve stockpiles there and ensure the Mars shipyards could continue with their prodigious levels of output.
85 Pegasi – Deep Space
“Sir, we just lost contact with the last of the salvage group’s escape pods. Looks like those bastards didn’t even bother to pick them up, just left them all to freeze to death out there” grunted Hewitt’s warfare officer.
“Ok, I hear you” replied Hewitt, “but at this time the best we can do for ourselves and anyone left on the planet is to keep ourselves undetected and be in a position to act if the opportunity presents itself”.
“Don’t forget they know we are out here and if there recent actions are anything to go buy, they won’t hesitate to destroy us and leave us for dead as well”.
“I’m afraid this doesn’t change the original plan, we will continue to work our way back towards the jump gate, keep listening for any signals from the planet and see if we find some way to get a message out to the Federation on just what has happened. There is no point trying to get closer to the planet, we all saw just how many point defence platforms they have in orbit, we wouldn’t get within ten million kilometres before we got blown apart”.
