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"No survivors?" My eyes probably turned bluer as 'Bane nodded. "Not in any of the major population centers, such that they were. A few hermits in the forests, and a few miners elsewhere on the system..." The warship sighs, then frowns gently. "Your family hasn't reported in to the relief forces yet, and the Military Services are relatively certain that everyone who is going to report in has."
"Yes, I know my family is probably dead." It was meant to be said with a snap, but I was too... hollow, too empty to manage anything more than a monotone. "We were... not on the best of terms anyway. Happy, perhaps, but not too close." I found myself wondering whether or not it was a mistake as I idly stirred the my tea with a slender silver spoon, watching my reflection chop and fade in the waves.
'Bane frowned a little more. "I am sorry that I am of no help in this regard, Shal, truly. I know a bit too much to offer such platitudes to the effect of knowing how you feel."
I nodded gently with a slight shrug. "Any friendship is good right about now. You've been taking care of me far beyond anything you really needed to do, and it's all appreciated." I hazarded a slight smile. "Just... having someone nearby is good. Thank you."
She nodded a little in response. "Is there anything else I can do for you, get you...?"
"No, no... I'll be fine soon enough." An odd thought emerged. "Hm. Could you... could you look into the procedures for transferring into the Military Services?"
The warship smiled wryly in recognition of a very familiar concept. "I can. And... I can simulate more than just English manors, you know..."
I held a hand up halfway at the tacit offer. "No... not yet." I sighed. "I don't have the..." My hands moved, trying to express the sentiment my tongue had failed in conveying, yet their physicality simply could not represent something so ethereal. "The force yet. The will."
'Bane nodded gently, frowning still. "It comes with time," she said, a grim tone underlining her words.
"So, how did this incursion get past our vaunted sensor network? I know the Thaurians aren't much for stealth technology, and this kind of thing is what it's trying to prevent..." Supreme Emperor J'hsen was understandably annoyed by all this, frowning mightily at the felinid visage on the other end of the transgalactic transmission.
Fleet Admiral M'Sharra frowned right back, although hers was directed inwardly. "I've had technicians checking the Sector Twelve net up and down, and there don't seem to be any hardware faults in the system. They all read fine on unscheduled operability tests, ma'am."
"So what does this mean, Admiral?"
"Well, ma'am... we have a few theories. One is that we have an OPSEC breach somewhere. It is theoretically possible that our security was compromised and they pulled a remote hack either disabling our nets or clearing them of contacts."
"Preposterous." Director G't'zazz intensely disagreed with the accusation, turning from its usual boisterously enthusiastic side to its cold, serious defensive demeanor. "Internal Security reports clearly indicate that the Thaurians have absolutely nothing on our information technology--they haven't even adopted pure optronics yet, and we've had the foundations of that down for a thousand years. Them hacking us would be the equivalent of a quantum supercomputer getting hacked by a toaster oven.
"Yes, and Cap'n Crunch hacked a telephone network with a toy whistle. I'm not saying this is what happened, Director," the Admiral growled low, "just a possible theory."
"Well then--please continue."
"Another possibility is that it's a transponder read fault. We do have traders back-and-forth, on occasion, and so do a lot of other nations. They could have masked their transponders to look like regularly scheduled merchantmen. The problem with that is," the Kzroth explained, "that the net automatically cross-references this with signature, and four Thaurian battlecruisers look nothing like cargo haulers. It's like what happens with the Reavers--they jump something big, they get flagged. If they just jump a cutter or two, it doesn't, although the system keeps it in mind if there's an emergence signature that matches it in our territory."
"So what you're saying is that the system flagged the outgoing jumps as friendly, as a hostile jump would alert command and a neutral jump would've alerted command once it opened back up over Where We Live?" J'hsen taps her chin with one finger.
"Exactly, ma'am. How that would've happened is beyond us, though."
"I want something run--this net has logs of everything it detects, yes?"
"Yes, ma'am, but it detects a lot..."
"Good. I want those logs checked, every single jump in the window between GLAIVE leaving and Where We Live getting attacked. I want every transponder and signal verified that it was where it was supposed to be."
"That may take some time, ma'am."
The Supreme Emperor threw her hands up in the air. "Well, we've just signed up for another multicentury war, didn't we? Take as much time as you need, moving with a sense of urgency all the same."
"Yes, ma'am."
The "Time Machine" is nothing of the sort.
In Einsteinian four-dimensional reality, information propogates at the speed of light. There are ways around this using multidimensional tricks like more complex forms of quantum entanglement and gravity manipulation, and these tricks are the cornerstones of every single superluminal communications system ever developed (and more than a few superluminal drives). Still, for the mundane lacking the necessary CT to do all these fancy things--like most of the societies the Weirdo Zone runs into--the knowledge that anything has happened only comes with the electromagnetic energy that heralds that event, at best. If Proxima Centauri was to suddenly blow up for no apparent reason, it'd only change the night sky of Sol in four and a quarter years. Of course, the entire system would see it on SNC within the hour, but that's beside the point. The soonest you know about a lightning bolt is you see it; the average time you know about a lightning bolt is you hear it; the latest time you know about a lightning bolt is when you're reading a history book covering electricity experiments a thousand years long since conducted.
Whenever anyone starts talking about lightspeed, thought problems come up. Imagine that you're going the speed of light directly away from an exploding star. Ignoring the fact that photons can be absorbed by the photoreceptors in your eyes or other optical sensors of choice only once, what you would see is a still-frame image of the star in mid-explosion. If you slowed down, light from the past event would start catching up to you again and you would see it in slow motion. If you sped up, you would run into light that has already passed you and you would watch the event rewind (although it would appear to be in your direction of motion and inverted, like through a mirror, instead of behind you and being oriented the right way... but that's also beside the point).
Now take this concept and apply it to a culture that has superluminal travel, superluminal communications, and electromagnetic sensors that simply cannot improve much more because the very nature of matter and energy in the universe don't allow it to be refined much further. Thus, you get the Time Machine--described by people more eloquent than me as "a camera into the past"--which is little more than a highly-specialized reconnaissance ship designed to hop outside of a system and record events that happened in the near past. It's no good for recording events that happened a million years ago because by then photon density and energy have degraded too much to be useful for important detail. At distances under a light-week, though, it's still good enough to get a decent picture of events.
"Hm."
"Eh, John?" Spaceman Kilkenny, a technician aboard Time Machine 24, looked up from his own display. "Getting anything past 'just what we expected to see?'"
"I dunno. Look at this." The screen he pointed at displayed multiple images placed into their particular frames, creating a sort of split-screen made up of various observations at different points in 'time.' Four octohedral battlecruisers, definitely Thaurian make, cruising in total electromagnetic silence, tight and clean formation. Another window showed the defensive cutters inbound, militia forces wholly inadequate for the fight. A third display indicated the relative positions of all the split-screens on the greater stage of Where We Live's star system. As the cutters approached, the Thaurian formation deformed smoothly, adapting to the threat--one ship moving forward to engage, two more dragging behind it to support, the last staying back to offer fire support.
A few distortions of space and flashes of light slashing through vessels later, and the defensive forces were no more. The other three cruisers caught up to the one in the lead and continued to their objective, the utter annihilation of any signs of habitation on the defenseless planet.
"Yeah, 'just what we expected to see.'" Kilkenny frowned. "Fat lot of good it'll do us..."
"I'm just thinking, really. We're not getting any SIGINT at all from this."
"Why should we? Thaurians got QE comms just as good as ours."
"For comms, yeah. They also have transponders and active groupnav gear just as good as ours, but their QE bandwidth isn't as good by design--don't want an enemy Si' sneaking up on one, after all. These ships are emitting nothing besides black-body, waste heat, and power sigs."
"Running silent."
"Yeah--and if they got through the perimeter, their transponders should be on unless they turned 'em off midjump. Explains how it didn't trigger an alert once they popped in. The thing with the groupnav, though, is that it can't be turned off. It's one of the major weaknesses of the Thaurs--we can jam their formation control and we can easily find 'em if we have any idea where to look."
"So they axed the systems manually."
"Something's not adding up." John frowned, folding his hands as he stared at the display. "Just a rating's hunch."
The High Mind Empress settled back into her cushions, idly swirling the wines and fruit juices in the large bowl nestled in one hand. "Tell me about this situation."
Ra'pij'okk almost smiled after the human fashion--it had been some time since the Ancient One took the opportunity to relax inbetween crises. "The Thaurians hit a Zoner world. The Zone declared that it would retaliate, and the Thaurians denied complicity although it is obvious their ships did the deed. This will draw away Zoner resources from their Pioneer 'cordon' and allow us an opportunity to rebuild if Pikbuuv's expeditionary force can secure the area."
The Ancient One chuckles, reaches out... and pauses. "Pikbuuv is lost to me. I cannot find his mind."
"He was badly wounded in previous fighting... perhaps Xonmik is still active?"
Ra'che'e'terrchangjon Pikbuuv uncurls his hand from around the knife sticking deep into his armored chest, blood and ichor quickly congealing around the hilt. Looking up with jaundiced yellow eyes, he carefully squeezed the talons of his other manipulator hand around Xonmik's throat until blood began to well up, gripping hand poised to strike with its cruel talons. "You will cease questioning my orders... yes, Captain?"
"This changes things somewhat," the Thinker assessed quietly.
"No..." the Mind Queen muses quietly, "we must let it play out. We cannot give up because of a mere possibility, not yet."
"It's a trap," Fleet Admiral Nibnumber announced.
"It's always a trap," Ka-Ri sniped gently, flipping through the weapons status boards on his console.
"Well, that's the only thing that makes sense," the human replied, brushing a hand through his hair. "They hit us. What will we do? Hit back, and hard."
"Which hurts them. It's nonsense, boss."
"We know one faction--Garbog--is Reaver-aligned and one faction--the Inquisition--is playing all sides. What if the Inquisition's been compromised or has switched sides?"
"Ri's right, sir." Val sighed, idly drumming his obsidian fingers against his display. "We've got no one to shoot yet because we don't know which of three sides to shoot at. Guesstimating isn't going to help anyone right now."
"Look, I bet you all dinner--the whole bridge crew--" the fleet admiral said, turning around to address the technician's gallery as well, "that this is some sort of ploy to get us to go back in there. Probably a trap. If we deploy now, we'll just get piecemealed by every podunk force in the Thaurian Galaxy."
Commander Fremount groaned at her station, shaking her head as she read the onion-paper printout from the secure teletype. "Your timing is impeccable, sir. New orders."
Walking over, Phillip snatches up the hardcopy and grimaces. "Well, this isn't wholly unwelcome."