This trip had the feeling that it was being rushed after so many roadblocks had been dropped on it in the recent past. The last major revision of the original plan didn’t have them leaving until closer to the end of the year. Robert was not that thrilled to be rushed, but then again. This would get him on the road faster. He liked the money and being active keeping an eye on how his investments were doing, but deep down. He was thinking that it was someone he was looking forward to seeing, and not the money that he might be making driving him to get this show on the road.
The short turn around and a few other issues, were going to cut into the experience level of the crews. This trip was going to see almost twenty percent of the total crews being made up of Colonials. Everyone had passed the test on the protocols, twice. In theory, Robert was okay with that change in demographics. The average age of the crew on the mission was going to be going down by about fifteen years of age compared to the last run. Robert was hoping that youngsters would not be adding to more grey he was sporting in his hair. He was to spend a lot of time over the next two weeks fine tuning his plans, before they launched on this run.
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18 April 3050
New Circe launch of mission three
It was 0800 on the ship’s clock and the metal room was quiet. It was as if all eyes were not on the mission commander, but they were on their instruments. Robert was looking around the bridge of the SLS Styx with his eyes and mind. He was using all of his years of experience to understand what was going on around him.
Jules was walking around the bridge and doing his own final checks before they started this mission. This was going to be a hard trip with all the cargo mass and mixed crews. This was the third time he had ordered checks. All of the previous systems checks had come back good to go, but both men were not taking any chances. While the crew on the core ship were doing those final re-checks. They were being watched by hundreds if not thousands of eyes, and all of them were not on these ships, but around the local areas.
One last message came from “The Station” that went directly to Commander Copeland’s private coms station. Then on the tick of the clock, the mass of three JumpShips and three dropships flashed out of the system. They were starting the run at 15 light years a jump and doing at least fifteen jumps a day. The crews and ships were going to be pushed on this first leg of the mission. Then again, they all had volunteered to take the mission, and it was better to break down close to home. They had almost one hundred and twenty volunteers for every single position in the convoy. The Office of Personnel had been picky, and no-one was safe from replacement. Not Robert, not Jules, not anyone. It was with that in mind, that the mass of metal and people started on their way to the Inner Sphere. The people on this mission were the best for the job, and they knew it.
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7 June 3050 Mission Three
The Split system.
The mass of metal flashed into what was called the Split system in certain navigational systems. It had been carried there by the Colonial built interstellar drive that was feeling the abuse that it had been put under for the last few months. They were not on that tight of a schedule, but they had taken four travel days longer to make it here, than had been planned for by Robert and Jules. They had to deal with a lot more interstellar traffic, than on any other mission the SLiE had seen in this area before. And it was the nature of that shipping, that was strange to the travelers than just the raw numbers. Anything that was straying this far from the “normal” travel routes, could be accepted as being dangerous to Copeland’s command.
ComStar and the Explore Corps were known to be out this far from the birth world, but their ships were well maintained. They looked and acted with a high level of, for lack of a better word arrogance in their dealings with others out this way. That was something that could be picked up on the stray radio waves that were limited to the speed of light. That was not a hard and fast rule for them, but it was the “normal” idea, outside of ROM run ships. What they had been seeing and hearing, without being seen or heard by the other JumpShips, looked like they were more like pirate groups or groups in hiding from others.
This was different and different was worrying to not only Robert, but to the rest of the small command staff for this mission. To make sure that they were still safe, this fleet spent more time in the space between the stars, than on any previous run and that was saying something. That had been very wearing on the crew, but not the modified Tramp and Leopard CV. It was something that could not be trained for, but thanks to fighting the Cylons. They had more experience in the deep black than any group connected to the Inner sphere.
The mass of human occupied metal, once it arrived at this hard to reach system, stopped moving in any way that could be measured. That took about ten minutes to accomplish after arriving at the Nadir jump point. Then the ugly mass started to move in very find details, and then in more gross maneuvers. First to move were two of the three dropship-based craft assigned to this mission. They needed to clear that area of the hull, so that the two smaller JumpShips could be safely released from the larger Tramp.
Still, it took four hours to separate the three interstellar capable ships from each other and get them to a safe distance from each other. By the time the current work shift was over. The large interstellar ships were doing final check outs of the “normal” K-F drives on two of the three of the newly separated JumpShips. While the engineering crews were doing their jobs, the fleet command and staff were doing theirs.
The HPG mounted on the Styx was able to start soaking up and copying data from the faster than light transmitted messages coming near it. They were able to take codes from all of the other missions to both start the decoding effort, and to slip in a few of their own messages into ComStar data streams. Over 90% of the data they now had access to was not valuable to the Star League in Exile, much less to support this mission. That didn’t mean that the data was dumped or deleted. It was stored in the Styx’s data bases, for the return to New Circe.
They would need a week to get everything ready for the next part of the mission. That had not been planned for by the big brains of the Fleet level Staff who had come up with this part of the plan. Robert and Jules on the other hand had seen this train wreck coming long before they had left on this mission. Even when their concerns were blown off by certain staff members on New Circe? They tried to have at least an idea of a plan after they were far away from the flagpole.
The holdup was the Surveyor class JumpShip. The SLDF didn’t have a deep well of experience to draw on to crew her, much less trying to safely maintain that type of Scout sized ship. That meant that some mistakes were made, and they had to be fixed before they could safely start the next step. This all had to be done by the small crew that had left New Circe, without the vast support provided by “The Station” and other parts of the SLiE. While they were working on those jump ships, other things were afoot.
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What Commander Copeland did not know? It was that a month before, this system had been visited. It “only” had been by a small pirate band. It had been made up of a Merchant class JumpShip, a Leopard, and a Mule class cargo ship. They had left looking to take something worth taking, and this location “had been found” by a contact in ComStar. This system had been a bust, and they had moved on to the next star system on the list they were working down. They had no way of knowing how important this system was to another group of travelers. When this ship reported back to their contact, a ROM Agent. This location was removed from the list of possible useful systems and moved to the bottom of the list for possible revisits.
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One of the reasons that the Mammoth class SLS Trish Edion, from the slowly growing number of that class the SLiE could use, was chosen for this mission. It was that two of her many cargo doors were almost three times the size of what was normally found on a ship of her class. In fact, they were the largest set of cargo doors in any of the dropships in the rest of the SLDF Navy’s supporting fleet. And the Edion had been that way going all the way back to when they had run from Clan space. They had also proven very useful many times afterwards for her owners. They just were not so useful, that any other ship had been modified to mount them.
Out of one of those huge cargo doors floated a pair of somethings that anyone not knowing what they were beforehand would not know what they were. They had not been seen anywhere close to this part of space, since before the Star League fell. As far as anyone knew, and a lot of effort had been spent looking for information about the old Star League military. They were just another item that had been lost to the sands of time. In the whole Inner Sphere, there was only one of these things left and it was sitting in a little visited room in a museum in the Galax orbital MegaPlex. The base of the long cylinders was a Conestoga Payload Satellite, but that was only what they were based on.
Inside of the pair of payload satellites were a small fusion engine. Normal solar panels reflect too much radar energy, and that was not good for this mission. The pair of modified Conestoga Payload Satellites were now decked out with spy or surveillance equipment that was well known within certain circles of the old Star League. They were very high tech, but still not bleeding or even cutting edge for what the SLDF could have put into their thin metal hulls. They were almost two generations behind what the SLiE used on other spy or surveillance missions.
They would move out away from the system’s jump point at a very slow speed, compared to an Aerospace fighter or dropship. They were not moving towards the star but farther out, so that they would not be stumbled across without someone spending a lot of time looking for something like them in the first place. The next time a SLDF ship came to this system, that was so important to them. That ship would be able to download the recorded data from the hidden satellites, like they did on each of the Pilgrimage missions.
This data would help the leadership of the SLDF, so that they could work out if they wanted to put a manned and armed station here. But that just was not going to be allowed if this system had too much unwanted traffic traveling through it. The SLDF had a list, a short list, but a list of stars that might be useful for any future missions. This particular star system was just at the top of the list, for many reasons.
With the two satellites deployed and their systems saying that they were good to go. The three JumpShips left the system that they were sitting in. Two of them were going to the capital of this local political power, without any escorting dropships. That would be where they were going to be put up for sale on the local market. The other SLDF crewed modified JumpShip was going somewhere else. The larger one was going on its own preplanned route, so that it could start to fill the massive cargo bays in her hull and the huge dropship attached to her spine.
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14 June 3050 Mission Three
The Ltzehoe system.
Robert was keeping his face still as the computer systems return to normal, after the jump of almost 30ly from the Split system. Not for the hundredth time he was thankful for the Colonial made drive. When he looked over to Jess, she was giving him a knowing look and then a quick covered eye wink. Robert just raised one eyebrow and didn’t say a word to the third in command of this mission. Jules might have noticed the by play, but he was too busy working to be the commander of his ship. Even if he did notice? He would not have said anything, in public. When Robert was off the bridge? Then all bets were off. Jules knew as much as Jess did about the woman in this system his best friend had a relationship with.
Not long after arriving and sending the light speed limited radio message to the local system traffic control. The reply came back to them, traveling just as fast from the planet. It was not a voice message, but a data burst of text. It was not unlike the very secure Tac Fax next to the HPG hidden in the hull of the Styx. That old method was the best use of the limited bandwidth, to get the most information to the ship at the jump point as fast as possible. When it was announced the message was coming in and what the format the contact was in, both Robert and Jules made eye contact with each other. Jules gave a nod, and the data was sent to the private screen of the convoy commander and the jumpship’s captain. Something was up, and now both men would have to decide if this was a mission killer or not.
Robert looked at Jules, after he had read threw the data at least twice. “Jules, I think I only want to take the White Rabbit and her two fighters down to the planet. I don’t like the tone of these texted messages from Duke Terry. And without her coming on and sending a verbal message to us? This could be a risk to the rest of the mission.” The White Rabbit 2 was a cargo conversion Union that was armed to the teeth, and that was not counting the pair of fighters she still packed.
Jules was nodding his head in agreement, and he had a tight-lipped look on his face. He didn’t know Duke Terry firsthand, but the message just sounded a bit off somehow even to his reading. The pair of men were still making plans, when the second set of personal messages comes to the jump point from the planet. Robert had not wanted to rush to the planet and land right into an ambush of some kind., but only because he was a SLDF professional.
By this time Jess had come up from the HPG lab, she quickly read both messages and someone from her intel section had run them threw the computers. She was also watching the faces of the two men as they worked through an outline of a plan. They had already read the few lines of text a few times. She felt like it was now time to add her observations about the messages.
“So, Terry wants to meet and have dinner on the dropships. I like the bit about having a catering truck come out for the rest of the crew, and that we need to bring the wine.”
She stopped talking for a second, and then bites her lower lip and re-reads the first message. When she looked up, her face had the “I am serious and now I am going official on you.” “As the head of the intelligence section. I am concerned. I would bet that she has had more pirate raids, and she is still having problems with ComStar. I don’t think we have a direct threat, currently. But there could be a short-term issue that she is hinting at. Still, I don’t see where we have a level of risk that says we should leave without making ground contact.”
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The White Rabbit 2 and its pair of Colonial manned upgraded Royal Tomahawks left the jump point, an hour later. When the dropship was four days out from the planet, the fighters launched and would spend five hours every day out as CAP. Just before the cargo carrier modified Union landed on the cloud covered green world. The 45ton fighters landed back into their bays, but the pilots were never more than a hundred steps from the cockpit. They would be ready to launch off the catapults, needing only a pilot at the controls for them to be effective. The trip down to the planet’s surface was without issues from outside sources. The data from the two aerospace fighters had not identified any major potential threats to the dropship in space.
On the way down, they ran into the first issue. Due to thick high-level clouds, it was hard to “see” on the way down to the drop port. But as soon as the Union touched down? That quickly changed. The space port did not look the same, as it had on their last visit back in Oct. of 48. There were two other dropships on the massive expanse of fire hardened dirt not that far from the White Rabbit. There was a third dropship, which looked like a Seeker class already on the ground. But it was off to one side of the city and off the main drop port property. In fact, it looked to be very close if not in the ComStar compound.
That was not the only difference that could be seen from the bridge perched on top of the 81m tall ship. There were no new buildings within line of sight of the dropship. But the ones they had seen before and were still there, all had visible damage of one kind or another. Most of the damage looked have been repaired on those buildings, but not all of it. There also were even small pits blown into the drop port landing area that had not been fixed yet. They were small divots or potholes, but there were a lot of them that needed some attention of repair crews. Robert was betting that any close to the marked landing areas would have been fixed first. A drop port was the life blood of a planet, and the smart leader would make sure that her drop port was ready for the task.
As soon as the ground was cool from the abuse of the plasma-based thrusters, and the ship refueled. Three different transports started toward the newly arrived dropship. From the logos, on two of the slab-sided vans the bridge had a good idea that they were maybe not threats. The two trucks were the food trucks Duke Terry had arranged for dinner in a few hours. The lead transport was a brightly painted hover car. Well, there was no doubt who that one belongs to. The three vehicles made their way to the shadow side of the dropship but always staying on the marked path. Robert and Jess were waiting for them on the access port nearest that area. What the people on the ground could not see were energy and projectile weapon turrets making slight moves to keep them lined up. Robert was not taking any chances.
Terry hopped out of her hover car and quickly walked up the ramp and gave a huge bear hug to Robert, and she did not care who saw her doing this. After holding that hug for long seconds, long enough that Jess was starting to feel a little uncomfortable with the display of affection. Without any warning, Terry released Robert and took the younger woman into her arms for another hug, but thankfully this one was shorter than what she had given to Robert if not less powerful.
The two vans had doors swinging open by the time that Jess had been allowed to breathe without some level of pain. What the people in those two Vans didn’t know was that the Unions weapons turrets had tracked them, just in case unwanted visitors had come rushing out of the vans and not tables and chairs. That is until one of them saw a pair of medium class lasers make a small adjustment at the movement. Robert saw one man freeze and then his head slowly turned to face the man on the ramp. Robert gave him a hand wave and a very fake smile.
With the friendly greetings done, Robert started talking in a voice that would not carry one meter further than he wanted it to. “So, Terry. It looks like you had some unwelcome visitors not too long ago. We took from your message, that the drop port might not be the safest place around. We left our main cargo hauler and Leopard out at the point to keep an eye on everything.”
Terry turned to look at the damage visible from that slightly elevated location. “That is one of the reasons that I’m so glad to see you. Things have been going crazy for the last few months. The news we are getting, is that the FedCom, DC, Free Rasalhague Republic and the League all have been invaded by aliens. Over a hundred planets have been stormed and taken over by these aliens!! So far nothing has been able to stop them from taking over any planet they want. Whole units have been wiped out by them, and they even have full-fledged warships to take over the rest of a star system. I was worried that they hit your planet! Where is it already? The notes you sent me were from all over the place, so I could not track where you were going.”
