-> Message in a Bottle
0912 Hours (Galactic Standard) 2.52.4E1453 / LDE InOps Division,
Lyzrantii system, Lyzrant
The overcast was the usual above Lyzran. A calm, collected conglomerate of white-grey fuzz spread from horizon to horizon and past. The mishmash of grey on grey was like a thick blanket that threatened rain and made a hub-bub about it constantly, but it didn't rain. Just thundered. The shaking of windows was the outcry against the rain, but the rumbling didn't stop. It was a sky tossed above a grim city, with archaic architecture that had once been pearly white but had a thin coating of charcoal grime on every surface, marring everything. Some said it gave character. The whole of Lyzran was like that -- tall, gothic structures with plazas and statues set in all sorts of poses cast from iron and copper and built from various kinds of stone.
The Imperial Navy held one such monolithic structure, with tall towers and gilded domes. Gargoyles scrambled for perches amid the security wares nestled high on the buttresses that overlooked the surrounding 'al Torro Velthseda Plaza and the giant fountain in its center with a defaced statue of what had once been Nel Ent 'al Torro.
Admiral Gabriel James Ravensdale sat in that officer. He sat and glared with glum dis-compassion at the number of reports on his desk. A line officer, reduced to being nothing more than a clerk. The military ran off this outdated, outmoded form of bureaucracy; the politics were beginning to wear on him. The asinine, inane and redundant meetings over the same things, addressing the same policies as if they're new every time. It wasn't new now, it hadn't been new five, ten or even fifty years ago. It was the same relentless bullshit -- a kind found only in paper format. Those papers lived, hibernated even, in Admiral Ravensdale's in box, determined not to leave. By comparison, his out box looked like a desolate wasteland, having never seen a report in probably the last two years he'd been in the office. In fact, every time he had put a report in that out box in the past four hours, it had disappeared faster than he could blink as his aide came in.
And even for the small opulence afforded him to this office and his position, it never liked it. Never liked the view offered by the window of the more luxurious portions of Lyzran. It could never distract him from his boredom or annoyance or his own feelings of inadequacy. Every day it was like this. The repetition had already begun to erode his sanity, shaking its foundations like earthquakes, attempting to shatter what little resolve and will he had to carry on.
"I'm more a bureaucrat than an officer," he would mumble from time to time, realizing he spent more time with councilors and advisor's and other rank and file officers in the same conundrum as he than his own family. And it was all to pull deals, ask favors, call in favors, put words here or there, possibly even the Emperor's ears. Vain attempts for funding where it was needed. It sickened him.
He probably would have continued thinking along the same lines he had always thought after assuming this position, only the door to his office burst wide breaking the monotony and a winded junior officer stood there heaving like he'd run the worlds fastest sprint.
"Sir!"
"Catch your break, son. And when you do, try that entry again, and properly."
The junior nodded, gasping loudly, sucking down air while he close the door, rapped a couple times, heard the Admiral say enter, then entered and saluted sharply. Admiral Ravensdale returned the salute just as crisply, then: "And what the hell was that previous entrance for?"
"Sir, if I may?"
Admiral Ravensdale just motioned his hand in a circular fashion, gesturing the junior aide to get on with it. Instead, the junior didn't say anything, and walked over to the blank wall holo-projector and activated it. The junior cycled through a few menus before arriving on a news channel feed. Immediately it began showing fuzzed and grimy audio/video footage of what looked like a standard LDE scoutship being destroyed by a blast from an unknown and strangely designed and configured ship. The visual cycled several more times, moving in and out of depth, showing scans of the energy blast that had ripped apart the small ship and various other bits of data.
"This footage was obtained just recently. It depicts the LDE scoutship, Starflung, which had been on a standard mapping mission of the unknown regions of space for the past seven years. As you can see, the ship was destroyed after encountering new, and hostile, alien life. Now we go to our panel of experts on what this could all mean; they are..."
The junior muted the news feed.
"And what in the hell is this supposed to be?" Admiral Ravensdale said.
"It's a recording from a slipspace probe of the last moments of the LDE scoutship before it was destroyed."
"So...this is real?"
"It is the official recording."
"Why in the hell am I finding this out from a news channel? Better yet, how the fuck did the news channel get this? Isn't it supposed to be classified?"
Ravensdale was fuming. How did a news corporation know more about a possible situation developing than he did? Weren't there supposed to be normal procedure for this kind of thing? Under normal circumstances, yes. But something had gone terribly wrong, both with the handling of the information, and with the LDE scoutship if this report were in fact real. Things would have to be done, no doubt. A taskforce would have to be mobilized to investigate, as well as a first contact group. Fuck, the Lyzrantii Dominion Empire hadn't encountered any new species since the Je'Kenkari, and that had been a shit show all by itself. The ensuing war had been terrible. The peace, however shaky, had thus far held. Ravensdale didn't want a repeat of that fiasco.
Before the junior could answer any of his voiced questions, though, Admiral Ravensdale cut him off with a chop of his hand.
"Nevermind, just get me Colonel Blythe over in InOps. Tell him I want a full report about this bullshit on my desk thirty minutes ago. And find out who the fuck gave that news corporation that recording! I want them fucking hanged!"
The junior nodded, snapped off a salute and left the room, huffing away.
It would take thirty minutes for Colonel Blythe to get there, in which time Admiral Ravensdale was left to stew in his own mired thoughts and aggravate himself further. The tabloids were going to have a field day with this. The only consolation by Colonel Blythe's arrival was that he looked just as perturbed as Admiral Ravensdale was, if not more-so. A short stocky creature, Colonel Blythe was heavily muscled, with a strong jawline, the darkest eyes around and hair thinning from too much stress. He also lacked any kind of pigmentation in his skin and looked like a ghost, ideal considering his job. He looked flustered, very unlike him, and more frustrated and angered than anything.
Saluting sharply, he dropped himself into the seat in front of Admiral Ravensdale without waiting to be ordered to.
"The problem is two fold, sir," he said.
Admiral Ravensdale arched an eyebrow, then said, "oh, so you already know what I was going to ask then?"
"Yes, sir. First is that the leak came from within InOps. I've already got some people snooping around for the retard who let the recording fall into the public domain. I'll deal with whomever did it personally. Second is that we have no spin control on this one. Completely out our hands. Already the public relations offices are being plagued with calls. What's worse is that two of my junior officers in InOps have already testified that the footage, however grainy, is from the Starflung."
"Who gave them permission to testify as to the alleged validity of the imagery?"
"No one," Colonel Blythe said. "They decided to take their own initiative. Don't worry, we're already grilling them downstairs, reinforcing the rules in the most...corporal sense of it."
"So this threat is real, not some punks idea of a practical joke?"
"No joke, sir. As far as I can tell from what we've dissected from all the records present in the probe is that the Starflung emerged into the system and began routine scans. They then discovered possible alien ships, at which point the captain, a lieutenant Kim Wong Tei, made a judgment call and loaded all data onto the slipspace probe. Probably the smartest thing he did, otherwise we wouldn't even know about this threat."
Admiral Ravensdale was silent several long moments, starring off into space. Finally he looked at Colonel Blythe.
"I want a threat analysis done yesterday on this, and mobilization of the sixteenth fleet based on that analysis. If this threat is real, which I believe it is, then I want to nip it in the bud. Also, put together a xenoc mitigation and first contact group. If possible, I want a peaceful resolution to whatever we may have started, if anything -- I don't want to see a repeat of the Je'Kenkari foul-up of fifteen years back. Hopefully this is all a misunderstanding."
Colonel Blythe blinked a few times.
"You have your orders, Colonel."
"Sir," Blythe said standing, saluted and left.
"What a royal fuck up," Admiral Ravensdale said, looking out the window at the heart of Lyzran for the first time in five years.
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