“Can you tell me about the Void Guard? You said they see themselves as protectors of humanity in the stars but how would that work in practice?” I asked Airah, deciding that I, again, needed more background before I could even begin to ask meaningful questions or make useful plans.
“I won’t be able to go into details until you have plotted your course, I hope you understand. But otherwise, sure, I can do that.” Airah agreed and started to tell the other side of the tale I had learned at the Academy.
She had been taught that Admiral Kezost had acted under orders when she began her campaign behind enemy lines. That campaign had been a vicious one, in that regard both versions agreed, aimed at forcing the Tellurians to focus additional forces into their own territory to defend against her raids. What I hadn’t been taught at the Academy was that similar tactics had been used by the Tellurians, only that they had supplied pirates operating in human space and even provided relatively easy access to a market for stolen goods, which put a different spin on things.
In one regard the stories differed, at the Academy, I had learned that Admiral Kezost had struck at civilian planetary targets, eradicating the population of three worlds in her campaign against the Tellurians, mostly by redirecting asteroids and making sure that they made planetfall. In Airah’s version, there had been attacks against populated worlds but merely against their orbital installations, in an attempt to cripple military capacity. Some of those strikes had collateral damage but the Fleet had never aimed to inflict civilian damage.
Overall, both versions seemed plausible, making me think that the truth might be somewhere in the middle. The next part of the story still mostly followed what I had learned at the Academy, that the Sixth Fleet under Admiral Kezost had returned to human space where a group of Federation Security Officers had been tasked with taking the Admiral into custody. At that point, both stories diverged again. At the Academy, I had been taught that Admiral Kezost ordered the execution of the Security Officers and spaced those in her crew that disagreed before vanishing from Federation Space. Airah’s version was different in that the Security Team took the Admiral down on her flag-bridge, using psions, only to have the crew turn on them while the Admiral was unconscious. The dissenting crewmen and the corpses of the Security Officers had been unloaded in escape-capsules before the fleet left Federation Space, just like it had in the official version.
We managed to get to that point but reality intruded with the alarm that we were about to drop into real space, which meant I had to focus. Airah remained next to me, looking at the instruments, when the scintillating light of hyperspace broke apart and we saw a bright star appear in front of us. At the same time, I went into hyperfocus, knowing that, in a system like that, there might be a rock with our name on it, floating through space. Luckily, the nearest rock was a few thousand kilometers away, a tiny distance when it came to stellar objects but more than enough space in the context of our spacecraft.
“We may want to hide out here for a few days, unless you have some sort of plan on where to go and what to do.” I suggested, looking for a nicely average rock in this desolate system.
“No, I don’t have a plan. A few ideas that I want to sleep on, but…” Airah admitted, only to be interrupted by a yawn, “but, no, no plans yet.” she finished.
“Okay. Why don’t you head to sleep, while I make sure that nothing bad happens to us? I need to focus on piloting for some time, so I couldn’t listen anyway.” I asked, realising that while I had slept on a bunk, she had been stuck in her chair, just in case the computer needed immediate attention.
She looked like she wanted to protest for a moment, but nodded and padded off, into the second cabin.
Nodding to myself, I decided on one of the many rocks orbiting the primary and set course, trying to look just like one of them. It was most likely pointless but just in case we were followed, looking boring and on a ballistic course would make it a lot harder to find us. In addition, I had no desire to push my luck by going above the rated speed again, not without a pressing need, like a couple Starfighters on interception-course.
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After a few minutes of acceleration, we were on our way, moving at a good clip that would get us to my target in a few hours. At that point, I switched off as much as I could, trying to make us look like just another rock, aimlessly drifting through space.
Thirty minutes later, I felt a dire need to curse when my sensors picked up the glaring flare of a spaceship, exiting hyperspace. A quick match of wavelengths told me that it was about twenty-five light-minutes away from us, meaning that they had come into the system maybe fifteen minutes after we had jumped in. It also meant that they would have seen our own hyperspace-flare by now and were undoubtedly on the way there.
The first thing I did was direct all passive sensors to the area of space where the flare had occurred, trying to figure out what had followed us. The readings were, quite frankly, of little use. It was just too far away for a good identification, only giving me vagure readings, forcing me to guess. If I looked at all readings, I was reasonably certain that a destroyer was after us, which made sense. I couldn’t nail it down any better, maybe take a guess what class of destroyer it was, but I had a theory on that anyway. Just before we had jumped, a destroyer of the Celraph system defense force had angeled to intercept us, making me think that they had held the course to get the required distance from Celraph-4 and jumped after us, jumping deeper into the system due to their higher mass.
I considered to jump again, but only for a moment. We’d have to change course to get out of the gravity well first and even if the destroyer was a lot deeper in the well, the flare would give us away and we’d have the same problem in the next system. Maybe with more time to prepare but right now, both sides were guessing what the other was up to. If we continued to make like a rock, they’d have to search an entire starsystem filled with rocks, hoping to find the right one. In addition, if the sensors on the frigate I was flying was unable to get a clear reading on a destroyer, I doubted that the destroyer was able to get a good reading on us, if they got one at all. I had checked, our sensors were mil-spec, as I had expected from the rest of the frigate but we were an order of magnitude smaller than the destroyer.
For the next two hours, I kept my sensors trained on the destroyer, watching for any hint that it was changing course to intercept us. It was heading towards the point where we had jumped into the system, likely in an attempt to track us from there, which was standard procedure. I doubted it would work, but that didn’t change that it was procedure.
At that point, I had been able to get some more valid data-points out of the sensors and had nailed my classification of the destroyer down a little better, making me discard my original idea. What I was seeing didn’t match the profile of the destroyers used in the Celraph-system fleet, it seemed to be a more modern one. The computer had decided on a seventy-six percent match with a Mondago-class destroyer, one of the latest designs introduced to the Starfleet. That realisation made me curse a little more, wondering just how good their sensors were.
The strange not-chase continued for another three hours, with me sitting on the edge of my seat, fearful to do anything but passively watch the searching destroyer, afraid that even the smallest acceleration might be picked up by their sensors and bumped up to potential contact. I kept telling myself that we were just another rock, nothing special to see here, at least until we drifted into a dense, for stellar objects, cloud of asteroids. It hadn’t been my original plan but I decided that we may as well stay here. The asteroids of this particular cloud weren’t as nicely average as the one i had originally picked but there were a few that were easily big enough, in the ten kilometer range and they had the advantage that they were close to us.
Once one of the larger asteroids tumbled between us and the destroyer hunting us, I gave the tiniest bit of acceleration, changing our course in such a way that we’d remain in the shadow of the asteroid for a little longer, time i used to match speed with another rock, carefully and gently landing on the rough, rocky surface.
After landing, I held my breath as we continued on our slow course, tumbling through space and out of the sensor-shadow. Depending on their systems, they might have noticed that the number of asteroids had been reduced by one. I doubted it, not with the millions upon millions of rocks the size of our ship tumbling through the system but if they found us, it would be now.