Turn 52 - May The Light
About a month after the
Scout jumps out
SARAH spots something. A lesser surveillance system than she would have never spotted a thing, but about a month transit time further out from the Zenith and Nadir jump points there are large jump signatures. Resolution is absolutely lousy at this range, and even the best telescopes can only tell you that there’s now something out there doing, well, something.
Whatever it is isn’t closing in yet, and a week after initial detection
SARAH picks up evidence of something jumping out, leaving behind something that is rather large and looks, in the incredibly fuzzy imagery caused by the sheer distance, like a pair of modular space stations with large rotating gravity decks. You can’t be certain, but there appear to be smaller objects moving around these stations which from this distance could only be dropship scale.
| [] | Send forces to investigate (from Jump Point flotillas) |
| [] | Steady on.... |
Back on Griffin’s Roost, the investigation is continuing but with no real progress. A few more minor fry are spotted here and there, but with the incoming threat it looks like everybody involved is pulling in their horns, so to speak.
This hasn’t stopped the various media conglomerates from running ‘reports’ that try and compare the Dracs to your grandfather… favorably. Alleging that for all of the ‘rhetoric’ from the Crown about the Drac ‘threat’ that the Dracs supposedly killed fewer people than the ‘tyrants’. The Imperial Broadcasting Corporation counters these reports quite ably with the most lethal weapon of all… truth, and public opinion of the credibility of the conglomerates ‘journalists’ is plummeting at breakneck speeds.
This of course leads to the conglomerates ranting about ‘Imperial propaganda and lies’ and directly accusing you of infringing on the rights of Griffon citizens by ‘stealing their tax dollars for the purpose of falsifying history’. They even start outright accusing the Crown of stoking ‘racist hatred’ against Asians, conveniently ignoring the actual facts of the situation and that it was these very channels which had stoked the ethnic riots that you’d had to suppress early in your reign. And when the IBC counters their lies with recordings of their own ‘journalists’ stoking riots the conglomerates immediately run to court screaming about copyright violations. Which the IBC gleefully covers in full as an excuse to show the offending clips over and over and over again.
Jake is
mean when he’s in the zone. According to internal polls you’ve seen right now the conglomerates rate somewhere between syphilis and herpes on the popularity scale. Personally, you are rather glad that he’s on your side. Especially after the IBC starts interviewing family members of deployed sailors about how the major media conglomerates coverage is personally affecting them.
A week passes, Parliament is starting to get in a bit of a tizzy. Due to security considerations you haven’t released news of the Dracs' arrival in the backside of beyond, so you have Senators and Delegates complaining about the mobilization… when the complaints become moot. A swarm of primitive jumpships tentatively identified as being those of the pirates who normally plague the NRI appear in the Inner Asteroid Belt.
Strike Fleet promptly moves to engage, while calling for reinforcements from the Inner System Patrol. The initial skirmishing at capital range is devastating for the pirates, with none of the enemy vessels, all of the ‘Stinger’ type, which or effectively space technicals when all is said and done, escaping damage. But quantity has a quality all its own, and in the Asteroid Belt, constrained by the need to defend vulnerable civilian installations, the
Lightnings of Strike Fleet are unable to fully exploit their great speed. The situation is only salvaged by the arrival of the fast elements of the Inner System Patrol, which slam into the pirates with brutal efficiency and eradicate them.
Efforts are immediately made to capture the pirate jumpships, but these pirates show no mercy because they know they will receive no mercy, and surrender is not part of their language. Of the twenty primitive jumpships that came in with the raid, all but 5 of the pirate jumpships destroy themselves in frantic hot-loaded jumps, smearing themselves into atomic mists across the belt, while the remainder self-destruct rather than allow themselves to be boarded.
No vessels were lost, although there are significant injuries to the crews with about a dozen fatalities. The damaged ships are cycled through the Refit & Repair facilities and are quickly back in action. A quick analysis of the action results in the Inner System Patrol and Strike Fleet swapping roles, with Strike Fleet taking over the mobile reserve role and the ISP patrolling the Inner Asteroid Belt.
Investigating the wreckage of the pirate vessels finds significant evidence of trade or possibly subsidization with or from the Dracs. Many of the dead pirates have personal sidearms of the sort common to the Dracs, for example.
