“Great. Does anyone have any good news?” Thecaptain paused here and looked around the room at each of us beforecontinuing, “Okay, as we approach within one day of the colony, thefleet will go to full battle alert, and is to go to battle stand-byimmediately. We already have our orders from High Command. Theywant us to investigate what is going on, and we have authority touse whatever force we deem necessary to contain the situation. Dr.Rannor, you will establish a task force to study all the data wehave as it comes in. I want probes launched immediately to startgathering information. If those bugs got out somehow, I need toknow before we arrive. General Zalith, start working on a plan totake control of this planet, assuming there is a hostile force inplace with the power necessary to take out the class-three taskforce as you described. Commander Vydor, I want you to head up theprobe operations. We need information and we need it as fast aspossible.”
Since there was little we could do until wegot some information from the probes, we scheduled our next meetingfor the day the probes were scheduled to start transmitting returndata.
Chapter Two
Because of the fairly limited time we had towork with I immediately went down to the ship’s probe bays toselect something from our stores suitable for this mission. Afterruling out the battle probes as too slow, I decided to use a veryfast, light-duty one known as the Specter Mark IV. It was thefastest probe we had, and would reach the colony long before thefleet could. In order to keep down its size its sensor array wassomewhat limited, but that small size made it fast and hard to pickout on sensor screens. The data we would get from this probe wouldhelp us in deciding which, if any, other advance probes should besent. I expected that we should start to get data from the probe inless than two days.
After personally inspecting the probe to makesure it was fully functional, I put it in sleep mode and launchedit. While asleep it would be virtually undetectable, and even ifspotted would likely be mistaken for space junk. The only realdisadvantage was that since its sensor array was fairlyshort-range, it would have to reach orbit before it would get anyreal data. Once in orbit and scanning, it would be highlyvulnerable to attack. If it were detected, that would limit thetime we would get to scan with it. However, it seemed like areasonable risk to run in order to get the data as fast as wecould.
There was some concern among my men that thismight affect our chances of sneaking up on the planet.Unfortunately, there was no realistic way we could move a fleet ofthis size and not be detected. They probably already knew we wereen route.
In one of the preliminary staff meetings thatI held to brainstorm about possible explanations for what happenedat Arken IV, some of my staff suggested this was a revolution beingstaged. I did not agree with that theory. This colony was made upentirely of highly-trained, highly-disciplined Imperial officers,scientists and their families. Every one of them was picked for hisloyalty. And there had not been a single uprising in seventy-fiveyears. Besides, why would anyone want to rebel against theEmperor?
What annoyed me most was that High Commandmust have known something more than they were saying. First theysent in a class-three task force, which was a thousand times morepowerful than was called for. Now we were being sent “The Jewel ofthe Fleet,” the Flagship Dragon Claw and her entire support fleet,the most powerful arm of the Imperial Navy.
It was very suspicious that so much power wasbeing sent to a colony with only a few hundred people in it, manyof who were just the families of the men stationed there. Therewere more people than that aboard this ship alone, and that was notcounting our support fleet. We had more than enough firepower toconquer several star systems.
The Dragon Claw was too big to even orbit theplanet; the shadow from it alone would push whole sections of theplanet into night. Our fleet was designed for meeting hostilenavies in interstellar space. It was a rare event for us to moveinto a system, and then it was only for repairs. We had smallerships and fleets better suited for interplanetary battle. The onlyreason to send us would be for intimidation, yet this was ourcolony; intimidation should not have been necessary.
As I watched the probe launch, I began towonder about the future … specifically my future. I had jumped theranks so fast into the highest position possible in my career paththat I wondered if there was anything left for me. There were onlytwo positions above me in the Intelligence chain of command, andone of those was the Emperor himself. The other was a lifetimeappointment to his personal council of advisors and rulers, HighCommand. Obviously I could not aspire to be Emperor, but I wonderedif in some distant day I would serve him on that council.
There was something else, too. As I watchedthe probe drift away I could not help but wonder what it would findout there. In a sense, I wished I could ride it to the planet andmeet this problem face-on. Something was out there, watching usclosely. My instincts told me that we were in grave danger.
While waiting for the probe to reach itsdestination, I spent the next day reviewing some of the informationwe had on the system. It was a fairly unremarkable system with afew small planets. The colony was on the innermost planet, whichwas composed mostly of rock.
This system was chosen for two reasons.First, it was almost completely surrounded by a thick, dark gas anddebris cloud, probably left over from some massive collision lostto history. In fact, from most of the Empire you could not see thestar at all. The other advantage of this location was that theplanet was completely void of life. That meant there was nothing tocorrupt any biological research.
The lack of any real atmosphere forced theplacing of most of the colony underground, with only the spaceportunder a small surface dome.
The next morning, I headed to where my teamwas gathering in anticipation of receiving the preliminary datafeed from the probes. If my estimates were correct, we would bereceiving data very soon, if not already.
“Sir, we are getting data,” reported one ofmy team as I entered.
“Excellent,” I said as I moved to the viewingscreen. “Well, based on this it looks like the colony is intact.”This surprised me. We knew there was a recent battle there that hadwiped out the task force. There should have been some indication ofa fight.
“Sir, this does not make sense; preliminarydata makes it appear there are around five hundred people there …”a young officer started when all of a sudden all the viewingscreens went blank. “Sir, the probe has been destroyed!”
“Bring up the last few seconds of data. Iwant to see who or what destroyed it,” I ordered.
“Here it is, sir, but nothing was recorded;it was just reporting data then abruptly ends. Whatever took it outmust have done it with one hit,” he responded.
He was right; there was not even anyindication of anything nearby that could have destroyed the probe,and no indication that anything was fired from the ground. Thismade no sense. “Ensign, you started to say something before aboutthe population count?”
“Yes, sir, the data shows about five hundredpeople there. Imperial records indicate the same number. We knowthat the task force was sent and did combat with somebody, so whereare they? All of the probe’s data indicates the population there isas it should be based on Imperial records.”
“That is a very good question, Ensign James.”This ensign impressed me. Normally I would not have put such a newmember of my department on a critical team like this, but hisinstinctive knack for reading data made him an excellent choice.“What else strikes you at first glance about this data?”