There was some concern among my men that thismight affect our chances of sneaking up on the planet.Unfortunately, there was no realistic way we could move a fleet ofthis size and not be detected. They probably already knew we wereen route.
In one of the preliminary staff meetings thatI held to brainstorm about possible explanations for what happenedat Arken IV, some of my staff suggested this was a revolution beingstaged. I did not agree with that theory. This colony was made upentirely of highly-trained, highly-disciplined Imperial officers,scientists and their families. Every one of them was picked for hisloyalty. And there had not been a single uprising in seventy-fiveyears. Besides, why would anyone want to rebel against theEmperor?
What annoyed me most was that High Commandmust have known something more than they were saying. First theysent in a class-three task force, which was a thousand times morepowerful than was called for. Now we were being sent “The Jewel ofthe Fleet,” the Flagship Dragon Claw and her entire support fleet,the most powerful arm of the Imperial Navy.
It was very suspicious that so much power wasbeing sent to a colony with only a few hundred people in it, manyof who were just the families of the men stationed there. Therewere more people than that aboard this ship alone, and that was notcounting our support fleet. We had more than enough firepower toconquer several star systems.
The Dragon Claw was too big to even orbit theplanet; the shadow from it alone would push whole sections of theplanet into night. Our fleet was designed for meeting hostilenavies in interstellar space. It was a rare event for us to moveinto a system, and then it was only for repairs. We had smallerships and fleets better suited for interplanetary battle. The onlyreason to send us would be for intimidation, yet this was ourcolony; intimidation should not have been necessary.
As I watched the probe launch, I began towonder about the future … specifically my future. I had jumped theranks so fast into the highest position possible in my career paththat I wondered if there was anything left for me. There were onlytwo positions above me in the Intelligence chain of command, andone of those was the Emperor himself. The other was a lifetimeappointment to his personal council of advisors and rulers, HighCommand. Obviously I could not aspire to be Emperor, but I wonderedif in some distant day I would serve him on that council.
There was something else, too. As I watchedthe probe drift away I could not help but wonder what it would findout there. In a sense, I wished I could ride it to the planet andmeet this problem face-on. Something was out there, watching usclosely. My instincts told me that we were in grave danger.
While waiting for the probe to reach itsdestination, I spent the next day reviewing some of the informationwe had on the system. It was a fairly unremarkable system with afew small planets. The colony was on the innermost planet, whichwas composed mostly of rock.
This system was chosen for two reasons.First, it was almost completely surrounded by a thick, dark gas anddebris cloud, probably left over from some massive collision lostto history. In fact, from most of the Empire you could not see thestar at all. The other advantage of this location was that theplanet was completely void of life. That meant there was nothing tocorrupt any biological research.
The lack of any real atmosphere forced theplacing of most of the colony underground, with only the spaceportunder a small surface dome.
The next morning, I headed to where my teamwas gathering in anticipation of receiving the preliminary datafeed from the probes. If my estimates were correct, we would bereceiving data very soon, if not already.
“Sir, we are getting data,” reported one ofmy team as I entered.
“Excellent,” I said as I moved to the viewingscreen. “Well, based on this it looks like the colony is intact.”This surprised me. We knew there was a recent battle there that hadwiped out the task force. There should have been some indication ofa fight.
“Sir, this does not make sense; preliminarydata makes it appear there are around five hundred people there …”a young officer started when all of a sudden all the viewingscreens went blank. “Sir, the probe has been destroyed!”
“Bring up the last few seconds of data. Iwant to see who or what destroyed it,” I ordered.
“Here it is, sir, but nothing was recorded;it was just reporting data then abruptly ends. Whatever took it outmust have done it with one hit,” he responded.
He was right; there was not even anyindication of anything nearby that could have destroyed the probe,and no indication that anything was fired from the ground. Thismade no sense. “Ensign, you started to say something before aboutthe population count?”
“Yes, sir, the data shows about five hundredpeople there. Imperial records indicate the same number. We knowthat the task force was sent and did combat with somebody, so whereare they? All of the probe’s data indicates the population there isas it should be based on Imperial records.”
“That is a very good question, Ensign James.”This ensign impressed me. Normally I would not have put such a newmember of my department on a critical team like this, but hisinstinctive knack for reading data made him an excellent choice.“What else strikes you at first glance about this data?”
“Well, sir, everything else also matches ourrecords. We do not have a lot of details in this limited data, butas far as the overall picture goes, nothing else sticks out …except …well, this is odd.” He paused for a minute looking lost inthe data. “Sir, I do not see any sign of a landing site for thetask force.
“Okay, so far no change in population, nosigns of a fight, and no signs of a landing party. If this was asimulation back at the Academy, I would say we loaded the wrongone,” he continued. “There is one more thing that sticks out too,sir.”
“Go on,” I prompted.
“If you look here, this is the startingtransmission time and here is the time we received it. Allowing fortravel time, there is almost a full minute’s difference, sir.”
He was right, but I did not like where thiswas going. “What conclusion do you draw from what we know?”
“Sir, I think this report is a fake.”
“Yes, I agree,” I replied. This was not goodat all. Not only did that mean all the data we collected wascompromised, it also meant our enemy knew a lot more about us thanwe knew about them. “What about the encryption keys? Were theyvalid?”
“Yes, sir, all the keys are perfect. There isno question our probe sent the data.”
“Okay, we need to start digging through whatwe got and try to see if there is any legit information in it atall.” They might have used real data and just modified it asneeded. If so, that might mean we could reconstruct some of it.
We dug through the data for hours and foundnothing that we could use. Whoever they were, they were verythorough. It was almost like they had known this probe was comingfor weeks in advance and recorded the data ahead of time.
Chapter Three
The senior staff was reassembled to go overwhat we had learned from studying the probe’s reports. Everyoneknew that that probe had been destroyed, but they were hoping thatmy team had been able to obtain some useful data first.
The captain called the meeting to order, thenaddressed me, “Okay, Vydor, your team has been working on the probedata for several hours. Did you come up with anything?” He saidthis as if he expected me to say no, with good reason.
“I am passing out a copy of the pertinentdata from the probe. The first thing you might notice is that thetime of the report and the time we received the report are notequal. If you allow for travel time, you’ll still come up roughly aminute shy. Other than that, you might notice that the data isperfect, an exact match to all Imperial records of the colony.” Ipaused to give them time to digest that. The captain did not lookhappy with this. He already had a good idea what conclusion I hadcome to.
“From this data, I must conclude that thereport has been falsified. This leaves us still with no informationabout our target.”
“Vydor, is it possible that the equipment wasmalfunctio
ning?” said Larath. He was a bit of an odd character; henever seemed to show any emotion at all, yet somehow still managedto convey that he cared a great deal about this mission. There wassomething else about him that I could not put my finger on, but Ijust did not trust him.
“No, Larath. I personally checked theequipment before it left. It was in perfect working order. It mayhave developed a bug or two along the way, but nothing that couldcause it to do this,” I replied. “There are only two ways that thiscould happen. First, the enemy could have cracked our codes andused them to send back a fake report, but I do not think that iswhat happened here. If ‘they’ captured the probe before it startedto transmit and played with its sensors so that it would recordonly the data they wanted it to, then let it transmit, it wouldsend it all in code. They would have no need for the codes; theprobe would handle that for them.” I stopped there to gather mythoughts.
“Vydor, is this something that is easy todo?” Dr. Rannor asked. The good doctor was like the grandfather Inever had. He always spoke with a soft, gentle tone, and was theonly member of the ranking officers on the Dragon Claw who did notseem to mind my appointment.
“Absolutely, Doctor. If a person has the timeand knows his probes, it can easily be done with this type ofprobe. The one-minute lag is probably from turning the power offtemporarily to disconnect its defenses,” was my reply.
“So it appears that all we have learned fromthis operation is that the enemy knows our probes as well as we do,and they know we are coming. They still have the upper hand, andthat is not acceptable. I want better probes assembled immediately,which are to transmit over their entire voyage. I don’t want arepeat of this,” ordered the captain.
Much of the rest of the meeting was throwingaround ideas on how to get information on “them.” Larath proposedwe call them the “Magi,” just to give them a name. I was not clearwhere he got that name from but it was approved. After all, whatwas the difference?
After the meeting with the captain, I headedback to the probe bay where some of my better probe technicianswere waiting for me.
“Okay, team, we need to get a probe to ahostile planet and have it stand up to attack long enough to get ussome decent information on our enemy. What are our best options?” Iasked.
After much debate we chose a battle probethat would only need minor reconfiguration to handle the type ofsearch we wanted. It could only handle limited, short scans. Eventhough it only needed some minor changes, it still seemed likeyears before it was ready to launch. Now, just days away from thesystem, we were finally able to launch it.
“Sir, the probe launch was a success. We willbe receiving data shortly… Okay, we are getting a good clearsignal. Probe is functioning to full specs.”
We still had no idea who or what the Magiwere. A lot of theories went around, even one that pictured them asmonsters right out of some cheap horror movie. The most reasonableconclusion was that they were a previously undiscovered alien race.If this was true, then we had a big problem on our hands. Thatwould mean war with an obviously powerful race.
Though I had no fear that our naval forceswould defeat them, it could be a long and devastating war.
Chapter Four
I was sleeping in my quarters when an urgentcall came over the intercom, “Sir! Come quickly!”
“On my way,” I drowsily replied. I hurried tothe bridge, where the message had come from.
“Sir! The probe is under attack!” was myfriendly greeting from one of my team members.
“What?” It took me a moment to realize what Ihad just heard.
“Sir, look there.” I looked where he pointedand saw for myself. A beam of energy or light struck the probe deadcenter. This was apparently the last strike necessary to eliminatethe probe.
“Sir, I think the probe is gone.”
“It would appear so. Where in the Emperor’sname did those blasts come from?”
“They came from beyond the range of theprobe’s sensors.”
I could have guessed he was going to saythat. “Any data on those beams, at least?”
“Checking.” Lights and pictures flashedacross the screen as he searched through the last tentransmissions. “Sir, they appear to be plasma bolts of somesort.”
“I want to see these reports myself. Sendcopies of the data to my office. I want blue and yellow teams towork on this.”
Plasma bolts were not a good sign. It was arelatively new weapon our army was developing. If the Magi had thisweapon, it could mean they were more advanced than we were. Thatcould be a problem.
While my men worked on the reports, I studiedthem myself in my office away from the noise and activity of theteams working the data, hoping to find out that they were fakes, orthat our initial conclusions about the attack were wrong. I let myteams worry about what the data said. I was looking for somethingdeeper. Even if I could not find proof that the data was faked,then maybe I could find some thumbprint implied by the circumstancethat would shed a light on the people behind the attacks.
“Sir, the report from yellow team is in,”came a call over the intercom, disturbing me from my intensestudy.
“Finally!” That gave me less than fourminutes to get my own report together. I was relieved that I wouldnot have to give my report without the information from the yellowteam.
One look at the report made me reconsider thefeeling of relief that I’d just had. I gathered up all my notes andthe new report and headed to the senior staff meeting. I must havetaken longer than I meant to review the data, as the captain wasalready in his chair when I arrived.
“Welcome, Commander Vydor,” greeted thecaptain. “Is your report ready?”
“Yes, sir, but I wish it weren’t.”
“That good?”
“Well, sir, the probe was destroyed by aseries of plasma bolts, three of them to be exact.”
“What?” called out Zalith. Apparently he toowas hoping the plasma bolt theory was wrong.
“Yes, Zalith, plasma weapons are a realitynow.”
“We have been trying for decades with no realsuccess. That’s the final straw, we must stop these probe games andattack,” said Zalith. “They are playing us like fools!”
“Zalith, let Vydor finish his report,”ordered the captain.
“I have requested and received permission todisclose information regarding the Empire’s research into theplasma weapons.” I paused to begin handing out the briefing papersI had received. “There are only two plasma weapons in the Empire,and both of them have about a seventy-five per cent failurerate.”
“Just what are these weapons?” questionedLarath.
“They are at present the most powerful weaponwe know of. Right now, we only have two prototypes, and nobattlefield-ready units. Still, the two prototypes are ten timesmore powerful than any single weapon on this ship.” I let that sinkin for a minute, and then I continued.
“The data we retrieved from the probe showsit was hit by three bolts in rapid succession. Each bolt wasexponentially more powerful than the first. The final bolt that hitthe probe was of a magnitude that could disintegrate a smalldestroyer. That is three shots in less than thirty seconds. Ourprototype plasma weapons can’t come close to that rate of fire.”That drew a lot of shocked looks and muttering.
“Why would they fire three shots? At thatrange there is no way they could have known that the first shotfailed to destroy the probe, at least not that fast … unless theyknew the first two shots would not destroy it in advance,” beganZalith.
“Sounds like a fear tactic to me. Once againour enemy is proving they have the upper hand. They know a lotabout us and are using that information to put us on edge,” thecaptain answered.
Time for my biggest bombshell yet. “It getsworse. Intelligence estimates that any race capable of the featsthat our Magi have accomplished are a hundred years or more aheadof us.”
“One more thing, Captain,” said Zalith.
“Yes?” the captain responded.
“I have been poring o
ver the reports from theprobes and have found something that Vydor missed. The Magiapparently do not have advanced sensor technology.”
“What leads you to that?”
“Well, both of the probes were picked upright around two hours from the planet, which is about the range ofthe planet-based sensor array that was there before they took itover.”
I jumped and grabbed a copy of the reports.“Captain, he is right,” I began. “Even the digital pattern matches.These probes were scanned with our own planetary-based equipment.”I blew it. I should have caught that.
Everyone must have been wondering what thismeant. I certainly was. On one hand, the enemy’s plasma weaponsmade them look extremely advanced, but on the other hand, theyapparently didn’t have their own advanced sensor technology.
“If they are using our equipment then we canjam it,” stated Zalith. “This gives us the opening we need.Captain, let me take some of our battle cruisers and teach thesealiens what it means to mess with the Empire.”
“Zalith, as much as I can sympathize withthat plan, it is not something we can do at this time. I calledthis meeting because I received classified orders from HighCommand. I was hoping Vydor’s report would make me feel morecomfortable about them, but it has not. This is not how I wouldchoose to run this mission,” began the captain.
“High Command has ordered that we are toposition the fleet in the asteroid belt and begin collecting largeasteroids for bombardment operations. From that position we are tosend a small squad to the planet to attempt to penetrate theirdefenses. Once there, they are to collect all possible informationon the situation and establish an advanced base to operate from.The orders go further than that. They state that Vydor will leadthe mission.” The captain paused here, as if to decide whether heshould continue, then went on.
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