Shadows in the Rift Part IX
13 May 2017Jellicoe
We found two more bases, both telling now familiar stories of equipment failure, unknown signals deep in the void and eventual disaster. The question that preoccupied me was why? Too many Why's, why had the missions been sent here? Why the beacons? Why the bases why had they met with catastrophe and why had the whole thing been kept so secret for over thirty years? Perhaps the biggest question though was who? The Federation had clearly not wanted this to get out but the Empire's hounding of Salomé suggested they wanted the whole thing kept just as dark. The two working together? If the rumours were true it had happened once before, but that had been a long time ago and only in a time of extreme peril.We headed for home, swinging round the Heart Nebula so as to cross the galactic arm in a slightly different place just in case anyone out there was looking for us before taking a wide arc around the bubble to give us the shortest possible dash for HR6421 and home. I fuelled up and went straight for Serabrov, breaking the coms blackout only to request an escort from our jump in point to the station. We had made it. I left Claude to handle selling our data and run repairs and maintenance on the ship and went to find Wilber.
"Alright Jell, glad you're not dead." He greeted me with a smirk as I entered his office.
"We lost many?" I asked remembering the attack by the two Asp.
"Good few missing but we did it, we bust this thing wide open."
"What did they find in Conflux and the Gap?"
"Same as you did in the Rift - beacons, bases, logs, all from the same year. This is big Jell, even bigger than we thought and now there's no hiding it any more."
"Give me the full story then?" I asked eagerly.
"Erimus is going do that tomorrow, all consuls need to be in the board room for 10:00 tomorrow so go get some proper food down you, have some decent kip."
The atmosphere in the boardroom was electric when the consuls of the Children of Raxxla gathered there the following morning. All were still tired beyond measure and all were tormented by fears for those they had sent out into the void who were yet to return, but when I looked at the faces around the table each one held a twinkling mixture of excitement and triumph in their hollow, dark rimmed eyes. Erimus stood to begin his briefing struggling to keep the smile off his face.
"We did it guys." He began and the grin spread until it seemed to threaten the structural integrity of his cranium. "We took on the Federation and we beat them." He paused momentarily to regain his composure. "It'll take several weeks to go through all the data we've got so there'll be no official announcement till it's done but the main points are these: in 3270 three missions set out from Reorte, one to the Formidine Rift, one to Hawkins Gap and one to the Conflux. The operation was codenamed the Dynasty Project though the code word 'Exodus' is also significant. Three missions to three different areas of the galaxy, all a long way from the bubble and as far as we know none of them ever made it home."
"Who was behind it?" Kron asked. "There were no clues in anything we found."
"That's one of the things we hope will be somewhere in all the data we've got to go through."
"Anything that might help Salomé?" Zenith asked.
"Again we won't know until the data's been properly studied, which could take months, we hope so."
"Any ideas what they were doing out there?" Eisen said.
"Again not yet."Erimus replied." Our intelligence people are going through it all with a fine toothed comb and their initially theories will hopefully be ready soon."
"Have the Federation made any comment?" I asked.
"No official statements so far but Devine's been sacked and a lot of minor heads have rolled, it seems to have thrown their whole exploration program into chaos." I nodded, some of my mixed feelings returning, there were some good people in the Federal astro-cartographic department and they didn't deserve this treatment. "Anyway." Erimus continued. "Until we've raked through the data there's nothing more we can do, take a break you deserve it, and well done."
That evening I took my crew to the 'Silver Star' Serabrov Terminal's most exclusive night club and we all got royally drunk. I told them all how proud I was of them, paid each one a fat bonus and gave them a month off as Dr Firman had advised. The next morning Claude and I sat having breakfast both of us nursing very sore heads and fighting the urge to vomit as the stations rotation made the nearby moon and rings of the nearby gas giant flash past my dining room window.
"What are you going to do for the next month?" Claude asked.
"Alioth." I replied." Got a lot of lost time to make up for, what about you?"
"No idea. Haven't had a holiday since I was a kid, probably stay here and help Wilber with sorting through the data."
"Claude!" I said with a mixture of amusement and exasperation." Have a break, use my place in Dares and just sit on the beech with a drink."
"I don't like beeches and doing nothing bores me."
"There's a plane and a boat there, do whatever you want just do something normal for once." He raised an eyebrow and looked at me as though I had just asked for a night with his mother. "Alright! See you in a month."