Log Mundy 10617-2237

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  • #24892
    Adele Mundy
    Participant

    Personal Log, Lt. Sr. Adele Mundy, TSN Raven, 2nd Flt., 4th Lt. Div.
    Stardate: 10617-2237

    Something is going on in the upper echelons: the Fleet Captain, Capt. Xavier Wise, Capt. Jemel, Capt. Verok and Cmdr. Tuor were all away from the Division this last shift. We were not told the reason why, and of course we didn’t ask.

    Cmdr. van Leigh ran the briefing, during which we were apprised of the ONI report on last shift’s mission, the one with the Kralien task force, which Lancer and Raven intercepted and eliminated. It also seems that the Kraliens have procured some tech that can jam our comms, and had been using it to jam transmissions from our DS bases; Lancer was affected too, though we were given no details. What is more, something has come out of the interrogations of the people we captured, that leads ONI to consider the possibility of civilian espionage. I know it’s ONI’s job to prepare for the worst, but the idea brings back memories of del Pino and his associates. And Hydra, dammit.

    Anyway, because of the shortage of officers (though we had several new cadets to make up the numbers, their lack of experience meant we needed to run with full bridge crews rather than double up on stations), the Horizon bridge crew was temporarily assigned to Viper; Matsiyan was sent to Phoenix to act as XO for Cmdr. Van Leigh; everything else was as close to normal as we could manage, with most of our senior officers away.

    Raven was commanded by Lt. Cmdr. Aramond, I was his XO and Science officer, and we had Cdt. Bacon returning to Comms, one of the new cadets, Chrys, on Weapons, Graybeard in Engineering, Quinn on Helm. The warm-up sims went the way they often do: a little shaky at first, then much improved as everyone settles down. The cadets, in particular, settled in nicely, as Chrys worked smoothly in tandem with Helm, and Bacon found some particularly effective threats to elicit surrenders.

    The mission was another patrol, this time in Krisenda System, where pirates have been making more trouble than usual, possibly because of some deal by the Penwrath Corporation; so we were to watch out for pirate activity, and lo and behold, we found some. Sporadic at first, as we patrolled through Krisenda 3 and 4, heavier once we reached Krisenda 8.

    We were under orders not to allow pirate ships to leave the scene, even if they surrendered, so there were several instances where we ordered the pirate crews to abandon their vessels, and picked up the life pods after destroying the main ship. In one case, a pirate Arrow surrendered, but then fled the scene while dropping what appeared to be mines. Almost immediately, Quinn lost control of Helm, and Graybeard lost control of Engineering, which made recovering life pods something of a challenge.

    Even after hasty repairs to the systems, we continued to suffer from intermittent malfunctions on both Helm and Engineering: at one point, Helm was unable to bring Raven to a complete stop. Graybeard took the warp engines offline… and his console promptly overheated, leaving us with no power at all. Dammit. As Graybeard and his repair crew scrambled to cross-connect the coolant flow, we lost the Helm console again. It’s a good thing we weren’t in the middle of an enemy fleet at the time.

    We proceeded through the WP60 gate and headed for the Danae gate. We did find the pirates engaged on buying weapons, though their supplier ship saw us coming in time to escape. We engaged the pirates and made sure they couldn’t take their newly-acquired weapons anywhere. On the way, a pirate transport ship we destroyed left behind a small cluster of objects that the sensors identified as mines, but that might have been small instabilities. Phoenix sent her shuttle to investigate. I am not aware of any reports on that survey yet, but CIC sent a Gaspode class through to deal with whatever those things were, and we were ordered on our way towards Atlantis gate.

    Which was not where Stellar Cartography said it would be. In fact, the sector seemed to have acquired several sub-sectors that Stellar Cartography knew nothing about. As a Science officer, I find this discrepancy unsettling. I mean, the universe is expanding and all that, but it shouldn’t be expanding in one sector more measurably than in any other, dammit. Or, if the explanation is simply that more areas have been charted, then the people responsible for updating the Science database have been neglecting their duty. Dammit, it’s my job to know where we’re going, and if the charts don’t correspond to sensor data I can’t do my job properly!

    We transited through the Atlantis gate and concluded our mission. It was partly successful, in that we deprived the pirates of significant quantities of ordnance when we took out their transports, but we were unable to catch their supplier. And to make matters more disturbing, the crews recovering materials from the battle zone found weapon components featuring some advanced tech we’re unfamiliar with, and parts of ships that don’t fit with the classes we know about.

    So our patrol duty continued on the next mission, supposedly through Cerberus sector this time, but we did not make it out of Promethean. We found large Kralien fleets in Promethean 2, with some Skaraans for extra spice. And we started a long sequence of attacks, that continued, with brief pauses for restocking at the stations, through Promethean 1 and into 5. RS-25 seemed to be a particular target. The common theme was Kraliens and pirates, Kraliens and pirates, and leaving no ship available for further use. As a whole, the Division must have picked up more life pods than we have in a considerable time, and the number of prisoners ONI is going to have to interrogate is significant.

    Matsiyan must have been working particularly hard on the ONI report, later, because it came through clear as a bell… Computer, let’s use encryption code Maturin for this, just for extra security:

    [encrypted text follows]
    The 4LD encountered a major Kralien incursion into Promethean Sector II after a navigation error in transiting from Promethean Command to the Cerberus Gate. The Kraliens made a strong demonstration against Command Post CP-94. The division rapidly engaged and forced them back, protecting a convoy recently arrived from the Cerberus Gate.

    A Kralien task force with Skaraan auxiliaries then approached Research Station RS-25 with transports and marine contingents. Skaraans landed strike teams before the division could intervene but 4LD successfully engaged and destroyed the assault force who were clearly equipped to extract, information, materiel and personnel. Station security systems appear to have been breached and the state of data repositories is currently unclear. It is possible a cloaked Skaraan escaped.

    RS-25 is a scientific research station with a history of papers on Hyperspatial Physics which came under military security during the past year during the period that 4LD were on detached operations in the Hjorden sector. Interrogation of life pod survivors confirms the task force mission was to confiscate the maximum possible assets from the station.
    [end encrypted text]

    Then we returned to base and went back to our sim bridges, and for once, the simulation incorporated elements from current events: we were told that our absent senior officers, for the purposes of the sim, were all at a conference in Volantis system, and were due to return through Volantis gate; we were sent to escort them back from the gate. USF ships, hiding in the nebulas between us and the gate, attacked us. Naturally, we responded. And because most USF ship classes have the kind of shields that require a coordinated effort to bring down, we had to group up to deal with them. So we were too late to see the other USF ships pouncing on the unarmed “luxury liner” as she jumped into the sector. I sent some friendly ships to defend her, but they weren’t up to the task; so, as the liner was destroyed, and with her most of our senior officers, the sim ended with our defeat.

    There were comments on Raven’s bridge, on whether this meant a sim court martial or a sim promotion… after all, there were now vacancies in the Division’s top ranks. I did object that this seemed too Mirror Universe for comfort, and the rest of the bridge crew started speculating how they would look with goatees. Was there an option for a sim promotion followed by a sim court martial? Opinions differed. It was also noted that there was no way Command would ever place mere captains on a luxury liner – that would be a waste of Navy resources!

    We concluded with a couple of more traditional sims, with no simulated senior officer’s lives hanging in the simulated balance. Even so, we lost all the stations in the first sim, just because we were responding to the hostiles instead of acting on our own set of defined priorities. The second sim was a better coordinated effort.

    And in our final debrief, we heard preliminary reports (that later developed into the report above) from ONI about information obtained by interrogating the prisoners we had brought back: RS-25 in Cerberus was in fact the intended target of the Kralien incursion, they had a contingent of marines ready to board and take the station over. The question to ask is, what does the station have that the Kraliens want? I know they’ve been doing research in hyperspatial physics, but I don’t have the details, and they’re probably classified anyway.

    [end log]

    #25003
    Matsiyan
    Participant

    // Read. Thanks!

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