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The strategizing began immediately. The clock was ticking and a plan was needed that would both afford the rescue and resupply of General Halker’s stealth fleet, while simultaneously whittling down the superior Hegemony forces. On top of all that, there was the ever present unknown of when The Hegemony had planned for their en masse killing blow.

Kel and his fellows, The Admiral—now Supreme Commander Preyl—and her attaché, convened with the top military advisors and strategists from every Memberworld, and in half a MilliCycle they’d settled on the plan.

Once the fleet was amassed shortly after, Kel gave the briefing, thousands of ships, hundreds of thousands of troops, finally privy to the plan that—if it worked would see them and their children and their children’s children’s children live happily ever after—or if it failed would see them erased and forgotten along with everyone else they had ever known.

“Good morning Fleet, this is Colonel Kelby. Operation SMITE will commence in 1 MilliCycle. I’m going to fill everyone in on the plan, you will all be informed your specific directives en route.

Okay, so here it is: via several waypoints, we’ll jump back to Heg central with Blunder, along with a small flotilla of our own ships—empty of course—which the Blunder shall conspicuously annihilate in plain view of The Heg forces.

While this staged battle unfolds, the stealth fleet that jumped through with the Blunder will begin spreading through the system, clandestinely rendezvousing with General Halker’s stealth fleet, laying mines on most anything we can find, and StasGens on the more important looking ships. But we’ll wait to disable—or destroy—those Heg ships in their Homesystem until the crowd thins out a bit as they pursue the fleeing Blunder, which brings me to the next part,

Once we’ve laid enough groundwork and Blunder has garnered sufficient enemy attention, she’ll jump out of The Heg system back through designated waypoint 5.1c5n, then Lg4R3.3, then AB205 thru AB209, and finally to X-Kilo7X.

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At each of these 8 waypoints, an additional stealth fleet will be waiting to destroy the Hegemony forces following their presumed allies on the Blunder.

Now we’re making a lot of assumptions here about how The Heg is going to respond, but the strategists have a high confidence interval that the plan will pan out as I’ve described up to this point.

After that however, the uncertainty grows to the point that we can’t be completely certain which branch of the decision tree they’ll pick. But we’ve got contingencies in place for the most likely ones, number one being that, in their confusion, The Heg will continue to send forces to the waypoints, the killing alleys—where we will continue turning them to dust—for quite a while.

But at a certain point we expect that one of them will make it back to Heg Central from our waypoints, and at that point the jig will be up.

Once they get wise to what’s going on, secrecy goes out the window, everyone will jump through and engage on the Heg’s home turf. We hit the gas and we don’t let up ever, not until every Heg ship is a cloud of debris and every Heg world a ball of slag.

If, at some point, they send an Armada towards our homes, if they attempt their coup de grâce, well then we’re prepared for that too. We’ll have defensive installations peppered throughout every Membersystem, annnd, very importantly, the Folly will be making regular jumps into each for the duration of this whole undertaking. If she sees any Membersystem being overrun, she’ll jump away to gather reinforcements and return with the calvary.

This segues into my next point: the Blunder and the Folly, these are our most valuable pieces, the queens of the game, or—if you’re more familiar with Bloorkäm Bhay’ktaa than Human Chess—the pyutha.

To be clear, we absolutely can not afford to lose these ships.

Without them, we cant make jumps of the requisite distance after the rifts evaporate. If we lose those ships, then our Fleets are stuck, potentially millions of LightCycles from home.

Ideally, at some point we will manage to capture more Hegemony capital ships, but we can’t rely too heavily on this occurrence. Additionally, during her rounds through Collective space checking in on various systems, the Folly will be outfitted with the same stealth tech in use by our contingent in Andromeda. She’s already 50% of the way done, and the technicians tell me that in another 10 MilliCycles she’ll be fully cloaked.

Anyways, that’s it folks. Pretty simple. We take a Trojan horse to their home turf, lure them away bit by bit and thin them out—all while spreading blades around the system to their various Achilles—and then once we’ve culled them down enough, or once they get wise, we cut those Achilles all at once and throw everything we got at them!

Good luck, this Colonel Kelby, out.”

And with that, we made the jump to the staging point…