Three teams gone, a blow by any standard. I personally knew several of them, not particularly well, but enough to feel their loss. Not to mention the cost of the combat equipped slip crafts and the damage to Affinity. We were completely blindsided. Meranda, my lead strategist, assured everyone that this would be no different than when we extracted the orb. Her only worry was the girl Alex getting injured at some point in the process. No one suspected that not a single person would return from the mission. Damn us for underpreparing.

I’m on my way now to a meeting with Meranda and her team, we need to discuss how to move forward with this situation. The strategists’ offices are dimly lit wood furnished rooms with short chairs and tables. We are meeting in one such office with a circular table positioned in the middle of the room. When I arrive, they are all sitting around the table waiting for me.

“We are so sorry to hear what happened out in the field. None of us thought anything like this could happen. We should have done more reconnaissance on the targets, but please understand that something like this is highly unprecedented,” says Meranda. There are three strategists, Meranda, Briant, and Owens, they serve to plan out the details of specific missions and then communicate those details to Jason and Dalton. They also advise me on the company’s long-term direction.

“Yes, I assume you’ve all seen the footage. I doubt that any amount of surveying the targets would have provided us with insight enough to predict what happened. It is very unfortunate what happened; however, we need to talk about our position going forward. I don’t believe that we have the capabilities to deal with this in a head on offensive. As the woman in the footage, we’ll call her Jane Doe, dealt with three of our five offensive teams without a second thought, while she was seemingly unarmed and wearing nothing more than civilian attire,” I say.

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“There are four courses of action as I see it. The first being that we continue trying to neutralize the targets. Second being that we attempt to steal the relic from them without them noticing. Third, we leave them alone entirely and cut our losses, or, finally, we can perhaps send an emissary to apologize and offer reparations so that we could possibly negotiate with them,” says Meranda. Owens looks eager to add to the last option and as soon as Meranda finishes, she adds her opinion.

“One thing to consider is that they might themselves be valuable assets to our cause, especially Jane Doe. They already have one relic, so they could possibly be helpful in finding others. And on the subject of Jane Doe, what we saw her do in the footage, how she was able to use the relic to cripple our slip drive, and how she patched audio into the command deck, this all leads us to believe that she has access to exclusive corp research. Research and technology that no amount of money grants you access to. That kind of information is priceless and would be invaluable to our own research teams. Granted, if we are to go in this direction, we would have to take an extremely apologetic stance and it probably will still be near impossible to get them to cooperate,” says Owens.

“I have already made up my mind that we will not be pursuing an offensive tactic. Chances are that from now on they will be hyper vigilant, making any attempt to steal the relic next to impossible, and a successful stealth-based attack less than likely. Jane Doe has also made it quite clear that any further action will have consequences, and I don’t want to find out what those may be. I also don’t like the idea of cutting our losses, this is the only lead we have right now on a relic, and I intend to follow that lead to the fullest extent. I want you to send someone to negotiate with them, I want them on our team, surely there is something we can offer them to sway their decision making, use any resources we have.”