Winner: Deep Space Operations by a landslide. We still have a tie on Contact, so I'm going to just flip a coin and let people know during the next update.
Naval Station Yi Sun-Sin
Equatorial Orbit, Crossroads, Golden Commonwealth
January 22nd, 2452
The browns and greens of the world of Crossroads spin below you as you wait for the elevator car. The world had been barren five or six decades ago, the hand of man transforming a world that had once resembled Mars into one that baseline humans could walk on unaided. It was still a bit raw-it'd be another few decades before the environment was perfectly settled-but that hadn't stopped millions from moving to the compromise capital of the new Commonwealth once it had been founded.
The Challenger was ready for space. The nine month overhaul had been unpleasant but needed, your ship in serious need of some upgrades and also the opportunity to properly replace equipment damaged in the field and repaired there. Of course, they'd jumped on the opportunity to raid her for experienced crew-the service was constantly expanding. You'd expected to lose Commander McEcheran-you'd written the recommendation that Natalia be promoted to captain yourself, after all-but losing so much of the senior staff had hurt. You'd managed to hang onto Gessica-it was hard to argue that you didn't your experienced engineering officer during the middle of a major refit, after all-and Madhava had somehow stuck around. Then again, Expeditionary Command had only so much authority over the Kumari Kandam native, so you weren't too surprised.
Your new XO was settling in, at least. You'd expected an apectid to be at least a little unfamiliar with human cultural expectations, but Liah had been doing well so far in settling the new crew aboard Challenger while you attended to a thousand and one other things, including using your contacts to secure the deployment of a Hoplite team aboard. Their equipment was heinously expensive, and you'd been told in no uncertain terms that if you broke them you'd probably not be getting any more. Ibrahim had explained why the last time the two of you both had leave and had been home for the holidays-the enhancements to the organic and non-organic members of the team were well within the realms of normal Grid science and considered fairly ordinary applications of genetic engineering and computer science, after all. The battle armor they wore was another story. The Commonwealth only had access to a single old OPF minifac that produced each suit individually tailored to an operator, and attempts to duplicate the incredibly complicated pieces of gear had thus far all failed miserably. For all that humanity had managed to duplicate many of the ordinary technological achievements of the old OPF, the Federation's cutting edge remained well beyond what human science could duplicate.
With the ship about ready for space, you were about to get your brief from Admiral Grant. The Challenger would be deployed at first to Deep Space operations-the thought was to give your ship some time to work out the new gear before throwing it into the Deep Hypergrid, for which you were thankful. A nice system survey or two would be a good way to let a new command crew gel before dealing with the headaches the Hypergrid had provided you over the years.
The lift arrived and quickly whisked you the few flights to Flag country. The view of the planet below was still spectacular, with a cruiser-it looked like the Angela Merkel-coming in for resupply on one of the docking ports further down the Beanstalk station. Of course it was durasteel with a smart-screen, and not a window, but to most eyes there wasn't a big difference. The lift arrived at its destination, and you went deeper into the station, returning a few salutes from junior staff before coming to the office of Marina Grant. The two marines on sentry duty salute sharply, the one on the left palming the outer officer door open after you return the gesture. Inside the outer office, you make small talk with Grant's administrative assistant for a moment about mutual friends before Grant pings him that she was done with the call that had held her up in the first place. He informs you and turns back to his work as you step into the inner office of your superior officer.
Grant had, like you, come up through Expeditionary Command, as captain of the first Discovery for a few years before accepting a promotion out of the big chair. She frequently observed that by any rights you should be her boss, but your relative informality, born of decades of mutual friendship and service, didn't prevent her from issuing the orders and you following them when the situation warranted. Like today.
Marina gestured towards the chair opposite to her desk and the cup of coffee already sitting, steaming, in a holder attached to the arm. You supposed there were some advantages to being as senior as you were, after all-your boss made sure her assistant made your coffee the way you liked it, with synthmilk and two sugars.
"Admiral." You say, sipping from the steaming mug with your ship's logo emblazoned on the side. Grant had a mug for each of the ships under her command and when her captains were in for briefing, they got their beverage of choice in their ship's mug. Rumor has it that was how both Rochelle in Ariane and Mila with the new Discovery had found out they'd been promoted. It was a nice touch.
"Nasir." She replied, sipping from a mug she'd salvaged from the ruins of her own command after it'd been towed back, broken, during the Galacteon War.
"Oh, it's first names? So much for a quiet first cruise to work up the newbies." you observe with a small smile. To her credit, Grant only quirks an eyebrow at your comment before sliding over a datapad.
"We had a plan to do just that, unfortunately we have a problem." She sighed, throwing data up on the wall for the two of you to review.
"What kind of problem?" you ask as the datapad digests your thumbprint and load whatever files it contained to your internal systems.
"The antimatter kind." She replies with a deadly seriousness to her voice.
The datafiles upload to your system and you skim them rapidly before looking over at the wall display. It's a map of a section of the Grid to Trailing, what more or less amounts to the 'frontier' for the Commonwealth and several other human states. The Commonwealth colony at Ctesiphon is lit in brilliant blue, Phoenix Empire settlements at Neu Adenaurberg and Chi Cancri in orange. A dusting of other settlements, mostly independent, sprinkle across a region some fifty or sixty light years across. Disrupting the view was a half dozen blossoms of red.
"The red indicates confirmed hits on long-range freighters in the past two months. At first, we didn't think there was anything of real concern-you know as well as I do that unfortunately it's an issue on the fringes still, and it's better than it's been. What pinged our attention is the fact that the crews were spaced."
"Well that eliminates Golgotha." You observe, a cool chill settling in your gut. Golgotha may be a haven for pirates and outright scum, but they had rules they followed that had so-far kept the various coalitions of the Grid from judging it worth it to remove them from their perch around Sirius. Rule number one was no excessive civilian deaths. Oxygen and food printers weren't expensive. Pirates were after what was in the cargo hold of a ship, generally, not the people aboard it. Sure, there might be the occasional ransom or hostage situation, but by the by as long as things stayed below a certain level of escalation, the big shipping companies were prepared to accept losing half a percent of their revenues. Sometimes the cost of doing business was a shipment of durasteel getting jacked out in the black. A body count turned it from an insurance problem to a problem that got a cruiser involved.
"That, as bad as it is, isn't the worst part." Grant replied grimly. "We got sensor data from the fifth raid, off of Ascalon, from a PMC destroyer on patrol there. They didn't have the chops to deal with whoever carried out the hit, as you'll see."
Footage and sensor data took over the wall, and your eyes quickly made sense of what you were seeing. And widened. Whoever was driving the modified Black Bart, they were using antimatter munitions to do it.
"We've asked our contacts in Golgotha. The Durant family are not supplying freebooters with antimatter. We're reasonably sure they're on the level, our intel estimates of their own production capability match what they're claiming." Grant said, pointing to a long list of numbers and confirmed intelligence. "Plus the spacing issue."
Antimatter was expensive to produce. It required infrastructure, solar panels and particle accelerators and the workforce to keep them up. Manufacturing it in quantities that could be useful in combat was both expensive and obvious. It was the sort of thing nation-states needed to do, or the very largest of megacorps. Given its destructive potential it was also something that was monitored. Golgotha certainly had the capability to produce it in quantity, but they reserved it for the use of the Free Navy and not just any random freebooter that called Sirius a homeport.
"So what's the mission?" you ask, sitting up in the chair and setting aside the mug.
"Find the source of supply for this band of pirates and set a beacon so we can bring in a task force and blow it up or seize it." Grant says, turning to look at you. "Challenger can take half a dozen of those Barts, antimatter munitions or not. Don't be afraid to break some heads. You've got a Hoplite team and we'll see about shaking loose some intelligence assets to help you hunt down some leads. I'd suggest starting at one of the wildcat colonies. These bastards are bound to have some people on the ground somewhere feeding them information. Shake some tree branches and see what falls out."
"Yes ma'am." you answer, standing and snapping a salute. "We'll get it done."
~~~~~
At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if the vote shifts suddenly in favor of Lee as your contact option and if that happens that happens given the vote's still tied and still open. Regardless, how do you begin the investigation?
[] Travel to the independent world of Ascalon.
[] Travel to the independent colony of Leahy's Lament.
[] Travel to the independent colony of Baker II.
[] We have a colony in the area too. Let's make sure there's no trouble at home, first. Set course for Ctesiphon.
[] Write-In
I'll have a bit of a lore post explaining FTL in the setting at some point, as there's important differences between Alcubierre (which most ships, including most warships, use) and Fold drives (which are much more advanced and, also, obviously, expensive) like what's on the Challenger.
