@lordraiden
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Something starts to shuffle and rattle behind one of the Jefferies tubes entrance panels behind the bar.
Then a few hits on a metal are heard, followed by some inhuman grunts.
A moment of silence is replaced with a loud thud and the access panel is flying across the aisle behind the bar.
A weird humanlike creature is crawling out of the tube, very erratically. Doesnt have much coordination.With a plenty of grunting, bumping into the sides, the creatuee finally manages to emerge from the tunnel. It tries to stand up on its legs, has to support itself by the bar.
Plenty of greasy, long hair is put aside from its face.
“What the hell?” Said groggily Lt. Raiden and looked around in a hazy, but also very angry state.
“Who put me there? How long was I out? What time is it?? This wasn’t a good joke!”
Then he caugh a reflection of himself in one of the mirrors and takes a pause.
“Ugh. I need to shave and shower.”
While he leaves shakily for the main corridor he managed to raise a hand in a warning tone and rather mumbled for himself “Fleet Captain will hear of this…” and left for his quarters.Raiden listens to Tivianne and in a sudden spur starts frantically operating his datapad. In a few moments he stops and mutters something inaudible to himself.
After a moment of indecision he raises hand to raise attention.
“Sirs, I don’t know how this slipped everyone’s eyes, but I think I’ve found something in the logs from Onwia Guard feed. I now believe that the pirates are travelling between Onwia and Drenan often. Very often. Take a look.”
Raiden flips fingers and Onwia logs appear on main screen. hundreds of ship logs can be seen all with their individual emission patterns. With a single breath Raiden continues quickly.
Take a look here and here, these patterns are duplicating itself in two different frequency bands. I do think that there are more ships travelling in a tight pack rather than one single large ship. But the log shows the ship class to be large, propably freighter or bigger, depending how Hegemony classifies these in this region. But the pattern appears many times a day and no freighter could be this active. I don’t know what it means really, but Pirate presence in Onwia might be much bigger than we thought.
Raiden finally stops, takes a deep breath as his lungs were depleted, looks around quizzically and as there was no direct response from the fellow officers, sits back to his chair.
Raiden looks very surprised and starts typing into his pad frantically.
Intel report? It’s been available for days… Oooohh, was it not published yet?
Well, here’s the link. The paperwork is hard to keep track of without access to fleet mainframes…
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12U6z_8Q77Jyt6WzoiSkH_cuPo6zI4wII56nMWmyTxMI
Raiden straightens in his chair and seeing noone else is ready to talk starts talking towards Edward Pierce.
Although that is one possible way how Hegemony would react, it is by far not the only one. A full blown blockade of this sector can simply mean that enemy will move their assets through Setmari, Ka’morlin or any other system. And while we could possibly use the time to hurt the local infrastructure badly, this doesn’t help the situation on the front as the resources woudl eventually reach it, albeit delayed.
It’s a viable solution if we want to surprise enemy and enable certain coordinated offensive on the front, but we have no such indication TSN is ready to mount counteroffensife so far.
Hurting enemy steadily, luring them to traps, hurting their supply lines would by my accounts achieve greater impact and weaken the opposition on the front and thus enabling the counter offensive and perhaps such a bold move as to blockade an entire sector.
Besides, blocking Onwia would certainly cutoff the local forces there and the most logical reaction would be to amass near Onwia/Drenan gate and trying fixing it. This would certainly eliminate our ability to sneak in and out of Drenan undetected and endanger our base moreso.
Again, I think this would actually be a great move to support a hopefully soon to be mounted future offensive, but I would advise against such a move right now.
Raiden takes a deep breath as if to continue, but after a moment of pause decided not to.
That would be all from me for now.
Raiden moved his chair to upright position, looked around to confirm that noone else is about to speak.
Erm, the modular base prefabs that our transports carry do require tethering to an asteroid of 150m diameter to ensure all basic needs of the Task force are covered in a single installation. Command has always assumed that we will dig into the asteroid and place some additional modules there, to protect the personnel from solar radiation. It was also expected that we place the base into a nebula to maximize shielding of our electromagnetic radiation as well. Onwia doesn’t have particularly corrosive mixture of gasses in its nebulae and thus locations that have been mentioned so far all conform to the expectations for maximum operability of the task force.
Tactically, ease of access needs to be weighed against defensibility of the installation and this needs to be a ballancing act. From the looks of it, a potential location in Sector 9 would offer better maneuverability as the patch of the nebulae is larger than the other locations. The only problem that I see is the fact that enemy also could close in undetected through the nebula and that we need to cover using passive or active detection. Patrol protocols would need to be adjusted as well.
Raiden moves a diagram onto the main projection screen with a flick of his finger. A circular pattern for deployment of passive sensor net is shown as well as patrol route through the nebula.
Also, if we prepare a shuttle with false signals emitters, we could deflect any scouting party from the approach path for long enough to power down all base systems and render the location virtually undetectable. Enemy would have to get within visual range to realize they have guests there and the nebulae here and here are dense enough to offer only few meters of visibility at best.
Raiden puts down his pad, turns around as if expecting some affirmation, but seeing everybody deep in their thoughts, reclines into his chair again.
Raiden turns at Lt. Cmdr Xiph:
Message received from Command confirmed receival of our transmission and urged the Task Force to continue in the operations with utmost haste. New enemy fleets have joined the front combat and TSN urgently needs a shift in the momentum. They regret the loss of one of the transports and attribute it to the incorrect launch procedure followed by the transport crew – Engine wasn’t shut down properly per the operator’s instruction.
Regarding Mr. Pierce’s suggestion, several operatives in the ONI believe this might be a viable option to us. However we do not have enough logs from our previous encounter (that lasted mere minutes) with the pirates and cannot sufficiently modulate their signal patterns yet.
A suggestion was made to deploy a comms relay near a pirate base or several ships to observe the standard protocol comms, perhaps even decrypt their transmissions in the process.
If we collect enough samples we may be able to adjust our own encryption protocol to take this modulation as the first transport layer. This might fool the standard scrutiny towards our allegiance and mask our comms.
Does anyone else have any suggestions, officers?
Attention, this week’s Intel report has been released:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jbavAP1_OT7v7JpHm81zCGYxnN-VhakF5kT3qopDkwM/edit
Fleet Captain, the ONI has just released the full intel report. Clearance level three and above.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OG5reuA0yOKgIvFttgA8NqhQ13lf9C6I72fDmdtZGyA/edit?usp=sharing
Raiden rushes past the bar door in the corridor, tablet in his right hand, stellar maps firmly clutched with the other.
Few seconds later he storms inside, directly to Turnez.
“Hello, umm, haven’t seen you around. Lt. Raiden, ONI and CIC. Noticed your analysis in the fleet conference. Quite similar to ideas I was having. How do you like Drenan so far?”
The Task Force David has successfully deployed into the Drenan system.
The initial arrival sector seems to be devoid of any permanent installation. Comms chatter registered in the area come from azimuths 0,90, 135, 180, 270 and 315. The relative strength of the signals received point to azimuth 270 being the strongest, followed up by moderate signals coming from 315 and 135, while the rest was weak. Arrival sector is positioned to be upper right part of the 4 explored sectors so far.
Upper left sector contained a heavily fortified Torgoth base, as is corresponding with heavy comms chatter registered. In the lower left sector we neutralized an asteroid pirate base. Lower right sector contains a base located in a nebula and a planet.
Out of the 5 deployed transports only 4 did make it through. While 4 transports made it through intact, only a complete wreck of USFP transport Amatha emerged from the subspace. Engineering inspection confirmed no living souls aboard Amatha and no usable material could be recovered from the wreck. Fusion charges did detonate the hull into suitably small pieces that the wreck location should not be detectable by any known hegemony sensors unless directly looking for, from a very close distance.
Otherwise the Task Force has amassed all ships and is parked in the upper right sector, in a grid C3Mk6. What number the sector will get assigned remains to be determined yet.
For the analysis of enemy force encountered and the assessment of the targets observed, I turn to the weapons officers serving on the active ships.
Lt. Jr. Raiden walks in absentmindedly, his tablet in his hand, reading some sort of a report again.
Upon entering, he raised his head, and found a place at the bar, so unusual for him.
Nods to Matsiyan and Mundy, with a faint “Sir” sits beside his captain Vaj, makes a barely discernible gesture at Donovan.
He’s quieter than usual staring to the same page on his tablet way too long. Guy knows better and gives him space, not rushing him to order.
“Damit, he was my first commanding officer after Academy…” his throat goes sore.
” I mean… I mean, he had such a bright future in front of him… ”“Guy, give me something strong this time.”
Guy checks our with Donovan who briefly nods. “An earth whiskey, from the common tab. Don’t spill it. It’s worth more than your monthly salary, but I beckon the situation begs for it. Enjoy.”
Raiden takes the glass in his hand, appreciates the color of the drink within. Takes about half of it into his mouth slowly, savours the taste, eyes closed. Forcefully gulps it, tears started rolling down his face.
“I’ll be in the corner booth” mumbles while slowly descending from the bar chair while reaching out for his tablet again, glass in the other hand.
“Was a good stuff, he would have liked it too, “says to Donovan while passing him.
Descends to the booth and it seems as if he disappeared there completely.
