Every Last Mother's Child
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Chapter 5: The Republican Fleet’s Continues to Work Up
The Fleet had been working up. Conducting drills and simulations until the fleet seemed to operate as if one person was at the helm of each ship. The fleet acted as one large body. It was awesome to watch this fleet maneuver in the backwater system less than a week’s travel from Trena. Now it was time for the fleet to infiltrate an asteroid belt.
Although dense with many hazards, and asteroid belt was navigable. Most asteroid fields were not so dense that a ship couldn’t navigate through the floating rocks, and gravel swarms. The problem was that it wasn’t one or two ships navigating the asteroids, it was a fleet of twenty ships of all types. Not only was it twenty ships trying to navigate an asteroid field, the twenty ships were trying to do so without being detected. This meant that the ships had to go in fully stealthed. This meant that they had to go in completely M-com. The ships had to enter the asteroids completely dark, with anything that emitted signal turned and locked off so they couldn’t transmit any signal. This also meant that low powered communicators used aboard ship had been not only turned off, but had been confiscated. Even the search lights sometimes used to aid passive optical sensors were turned off. The old mark one eyeball and passive infrared were the only sensors that the infiltrating ships were allowed to use. Such was the respect that the republicans had of the Trenan Space Defense Command.
The first attempt was if not a complete disaster nearly so. They tried to move the entire fleet into the rocks only the quick action by a couple of helmsmen and their computer assistants prevented a catastrophe. The tried it again and this time the Battleship Morgan collided with a rock. The damage done to the battle ship caused it to be towed back to home port of New Baltimore.
The next time instead of moving the fleet in a group they sent a single ship in. It mapped the asteroids. It was then that they realized that the asteroids approaching Trena were well mapped and freely distributed to everyone. Using that principle they used the mapping they had conducted and attempted to insert the ships by coming out of FTL at specific spot in the asteroids. It worked but they couldn’t all do this as the Trenans would spot that.
Agents on Trena were trying to turn any one working the space defense organizations. The embassy on Trena realized they had been talking to Junior. The back up to Trena’s main defense computer had been compromised months ago.
Book 6: The Plan Begins to Come Together