The morning after our long conversation, Roh said he would return in seven days with a friend and something ‘useful’. We told him that we would wait for his return. As we waited, we radioed back across our secured channel to make sure that Levi was tracking. Levi sent back an all-clear sign.

He was, suffice to say, very pleased at the news. As much as possible I sent him what we’d learned.

Roh was trying to avoid the semi-watchful eye of the ten or so Volk who had been stationed here. They knew that they had a shit job and they made sure that the Mane in the area knew

“What’s the play here?” Kiernan asked me. “Do we incite a rebellion?”

“I don’t think that we have enough intel to make a decision one way or another. The thing that I want to see is how often the Volk resupply. Then we can learn what the heck they are doing. It sounds like they have some way of moving between star systems that we haven’t learned yet.”

There is a truth in all warfare, that an Army runs on its stomach. Even this far out, there had to be a long tail of support. Those purple fruits probably got boring after a while. The same could probably be said of civilians and their supply chains, except with a lot more griping and a lot less staff duty.

“There is also the fact that we don’t want to draw attention to Earth,” I said. “We need to learn more about the Volk either through Roh or through the Mane. If we can pretend to be Ucit when we do that, we can avoid a lot of interest. More importantly, I think that we should be able to get a better star map from the volk somehow. One that has all of the interested parties and their locations. ”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Alright. Here is what I see as our objectives. Gather intelligence on the Volk. Learn more about the Mane. That one I’ll call Civil Information Gathering. Once we have enough information, we can start calling shots on what is more important to know. We’ll utilize our sky brains as our Civil Information Management team so as we learn things down here, we’ll relay reports up and then they will look for trends. It’s something we did in Iraq.”

“When were you enlisted?” Kiernan said.

I’d talked about my time before with her. Kiernan was always one of those officers that it was hard to tell exactly what their contribution was to the cause, but it was something she always got glowing reviews for.

“Yeah, we did a lot of this kind of thing, learning about the local population. Learning about indigenous populations and institutions, learning how things work and all that. This way we get a sense of the bigger picture since we don’t have some overall clear guidance to go by. Just finding suitable targets for colonization

The three of us were sitting in a small circle together. Not needing food wasn’t new to us but being in a physical body was. We should be eating something. It felt like it should be tea time.

----------------------------------------

I could drop into my own VR easily, and with a bit of trickery Levi was sending us instructions on how to do a low fidelity virtual reality sync over radio, but I missed the speed and power of the hardline that our probes had afforded us previously.