New Edmonton System- Stellar League space

08:00 October 10, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

BB-275 Saint Anslem

Commodore James Tecumseh, a dark-skinned man with Amerindian features, sat on the bridge of his battleship, looked down at his hand, flexing his fingers and watching them respond. There was no delay between the thought and the movement and in fact the arm looked completely natural.

He knew better though, having lost both of his arms and a leg to a failed commerce raiding operation when the pirate they had been arming had turned on him for a betrayal he hadn’t committed. He shivered at the memory, his implants recalling perfectly how the rainbow scaly skinned Coati with his colorful hair and eyes loomed over him with a gun, the sharp pain in his shoulders and hip as he had tried to crawl away, the knowledge that he was going to die like this… until Barbados had burst in and saved him from a slow death at the hands of the insane pirate. 

The arms and leg had been a complete writeoff, amputated by the doctor and in order to become functional again, he had made the hard decision to go with emergency prosthetics, which made it harder for the body to regrow limbs if a person did have good compatibility with the treatment. As Tecumseh had expected, when he had gotten back to the Commonwealth and had his injuries looked at, it had rendered him unable to regrow the limbs. Thankfully the Commonwealth did take care of their soldiers and the replacements for the emergency ones looked real enough.

But they still felt a bit wrong, and he had been assured that was normal.

“Commodore!”

As one of his officers called out in alarm, his implant ‘pinged’ with an emergency alert. “What is it?” He asked, the alarm in the officer's voice unsettled him.

“Strategic Omega Alert,” she said, eyes wide, “Sol is under attack. So is Tau Ceti. A dozen other systems as well; we’re still identifying where and what.” She sounded shaken and Tecumseh felt his stomach drop out of his body. 

“Alright,” he said after a moment to collect his thoughts. “Let’s calm down, Mayr, we are not under attack right?” The New Edmonton System was theirs by right of conquest, and they were using it as a forward base for the ‘Coreward Strategic Initiative.’ Not exactly the same as Walkingstick’s Rimward Marches, but similar enough the Committee for Human Unification had given it an impressive name and a Marshall.

“No Sir, nothing is showing up on the system defense network.” The dusky skinned, red haired officer at the tactical station replied. 

“Then…” he trailed off as his implant pinged with a different priority alert and he blinked as he looked it over before he refocused on his people. “Commander Mayr, Marshall Tesla is calling us in for a meeting. You have the watch, but don’t be afraid to interrupt if anything happens.”

“Yes Sir.” The redhead gave him a nod and he got up from the chair at the center of the bridge and walked into his office.

Tecumseh settled down in his seat and told the wall to throw the faces of all the others in the meeting up there for him to see. There were a lot of people already in the call, in the largest section and centered was Marshall Kyran Tesla. He was a pale man with white hair brought on from stress and age and eyes so dark they looked black. Despite the fact that some of them were light years away in other Star systems, the Q-coms all their ships had allowed them to have real-time conversions.

Once the last person finally joined Tesla cleared his throat as people began to babble in panic, cutting them off. “Alright everyone, I know this was a shock but we cannot allow it to rule our decision making. So, I want you all to listen to me.” He said the words very carefully as his gaze travelled over all the faces. “We will continue with what we have planned for the Stellar League as most of the ships are already on their way to their targets,” he nodded to one of the admirals, but Tecumseh was still too knew to know who it was off the top of his head, “the rest of us have to be prepared for word to come down from Sol about new orders.”

“It’s the Alliance?!” Someone interrupted with the news. “What are they doing in Sol?!”

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Tesla leveled a glare at the offender and the officer flushed in embarrassment and quieted down.

“It doesn’t matter who it is, but review the status of your ships and make sure you are ready for new orders, we may be asked to aban…” 

Suddenly the wall in front of Tecumseh blanked, cutting off Tesla midword and instantly he was in his ship’s neural net, Querying the ship’s systems to see what had gone wrong.

“Commander Mayr! Report! What is going on?” He snapped the command over in implant at her, more harsh than he intended, bad memories of the last time a ship had failed to respond to him poked in the back of his mind.

“I have no clue Sir!” She sounded just as surprised.

Tecumseh took a deep breath to calm himself, they had time, and stood to walk out onto the bridge where Mayr was looking over the communication station with the people there and the holotank was currently displaying a feed of the New Edmonton System. A frozen image he noted.

“So what happened?” He asked and Mayr shot up, turning to face him with a look way too close to panic. He understood the communication officer being frightened, but Mayr was a steady woman. Her being scared was never a good sign.

“Sir, Commander Xavier is still verifying, but it looks like all the Q-coms everywhere are down.” 

For a moment, it didn’t register, as there was no way to completely jam a Q-com, they were quantum entangled pairs and while they could be destroyed by damage or malfunction it was such an essential part of communication in Commonwealth that they were meticulously maintained. But she hadn’t said ‘their Q-coms were down.’

She had said ‘everyone’s Q-coms were down.”’

Just as the horror of that implication started to settle in when the com officer spoke up. “Transmission from Marshall Tesla.”

“Put it here.” Tecumseh thought his voice was a bit too level as he pointed to the holotank. 

A flat image, a recording no doubt, of the Marshall appeared. He looked grim.

“All Commonwealth warships are to gather around the New Edmonton Supply Depot, as close as possible. I do not know what has happened, but my ship's Q-com equipment has stopped responding entirely. For now we will talk the old-fashioned way until we can find out what is wrong.”

“You heard the Marshall.” Tecumseh said. “Pull us in closer to the Depot and the flagship.” He opened an implant-only channel to the lead engineer. 

“Xavier?” He asked over the mental link and he felt a bit of annoyance from the man.

“I’m dealing with a bit of a clusterfuck at the moment Commodore, what do you need?” His reply was gruff.

“I need you and your engineers to check over the Q-com equipment with a fine-toothed comb. All of it. The ships entangled blocks, the Q-probes, everything. If we can find out what’s wrong then we can fix it.”

“I will get on it Commodore, but…” Xavier paused for a noticeably long time. “Sir, if the Alliance attacked Sol and we suddenly lost all Q-com functionality, that means the central switchboard station was destroyed.”

Tecumseh stared at the holotank and the frozen image of Tesla with a growing knot on his stomach. He was a 28th century navy officer, all his training, hell, his whole life had always included the near real-time connections the Q-coms had offered. If the station had been destroyed then the Terran Commonwealth had just suffered its worst defeat in its entire history and they would be poorer for it.

No orders could come from high command in an instant, ships would no longer be able to talk in real time across the light years, even their own sensor net here would be useless as the Q-probes seeded around the system which had fed their data would be useless. They would have to rely on light speed data, and light in this day and age was slow.

“Do your best Xavier.” He commanded, before shutting the link to the engineer, using his implants to order Anslem to bring up the last bit of data they had on the Sol battle they had.

The scene flickered to life in the holotank and as Tecumseh studied it, he pulled on his long black braid, deep in thought. That was a good sized fleet and they had been paying dearly for their attack, their fighters having rounded the Moon to attack the station and run into the meat grinder that had set up there to protect the switchboard station on which every Q-com ran through. Mayr stepped up beside him and pointed into the mess to the single contact of an Alliance Falcon what appeared to be inches from the station itself.

“Mayr,” Tecumseh said quietly, “I want you to look into our databases for tactics based on lightspeed data. Do you understand?”

“Yes Sir.” She saluted before she went to her task.

And Commodore James Tecumseh stared at the still of the battle, the Falcon fighter on it's frozen suicide course, shuttered and turned away.