My brief story!

The light cruiser HMS Vincent floated in the vast void of space, well within the active scanner range of LP3 and lateral sensor arrays 107 positive and 259 negative and within passive scanning range of the Behemoth Battleship HMS Daedalus.

Since the abduction of Admiral Dax over 6 standard months ago CnC had been besotted with the idea of a fleet of unknown vessels in large numbers entering the system and blowing away the fleet before anyone knew what was sitting on their door stop, which is why Vincent was the last member of Task Force Beta, whose sole purpose was to get as close to the home world as possible by any means and so far the crew had performed outstandingly, not only evading all detection, sometimes by the smallest of margins, but taking the lead on the last ship in the Task Force by almost 27 hours and the captain was as pleased as punch.

Scanner Tech Sam Pearson was sat hunched over his console looking for the next loop hole in the scan field, all data of which was being logged for CnC to close them down, when an anomaly within the tracking data flashed it's self red in the attention section of his holo.

Sam was about to clear the anomaly down when the computers flashed up Radiation data and a projected course in or out of the system, normally this kind of data would be passed off as a glitch within the tracking software, but, as the course neatly intersected the point at which the admirals shuttle was intercepted Sam punched the details into the database and waited while the computers crunched the numbers.

It wasn't too long before the holo came back with a bizarre answer, they were indicating that the source of the radiation was microwave and they were artificially generated, Sam punched up the further information that was available and the computers displayed information on an old NASA oddball project that was promised to revolutionise space travel back in the days prior to Impulse drive, back in the day they were called the Resonant Cavity Thrusters and were thought to produce no exhaust emissions at all, although they were quickly debunked at the time as unfeasible as they breached all known laws of Physics.

Now however the computers were advising of their working existence and indicated they were active in the system at least once.

Sam took a gamble and queried the Lateral arrays and Listening posts on a scrambled, tight beam, laser communication, asking if there were any other such tacks within the system and as this was going to take some time he sat back and worked on the more pressing task of finding the next loop hole for the Capt. to manoeuvre the Vincent past the Daedalus and onto the home straight.

---

David Ortega, Captain His Majesty's Ship the Battle Cruiser Prince William sat at peace in the command chair, currently they were sitting in the wake of HMS Daedalus in the void created by their exhaust emissions waiting for Commander Precious Armitage to make a move on the main planet.

Ortega knew the general area they were headed to, or at least his Scan Techs had a vague inkling, which with the range of equipment available to them was almost as good.

“Time till last contact” the first officer lazily asked.

“26 hours 43 minutes and 27seconds mark” was the prompt reply from the scanning section and Ortega smiled, Precious was taking her own sweet time about this one, and rightly so all that data was going to come in handy.

***

Commander Precious Armitage sat in the command chair as tense as a Baluvian Faux cat waiting to pounce on an unwary prey, all the last loop holes had been closed down, it was going to nigh on impossible to get through, but she was going to die trying, metaphorically speaking of course.

“Sam, you got those manoeuvres for me?” she asked, but Sam didn't seem to be listening and for Sam not to respond was most peculiar.

Precious stood and walked over to where Sam was intently pouring over a star map of the system showing a criss crossing of overlaying ship movements, however, just before she got there Sam appeared to explode.

“Holy fucking shit!” he shouted as he jumped to his feet and stared into her face, not realising she was already near to him, “Captain,” he said, “I have multiple inbound bogies on an intercept course with the Daedalus. Ma'am, they're using Microwave drive, we just can't give you an accurate time on target as we don't know their capability.”

Precious looked right into Sam's eyes and knew the answer to her question before she asked, “you're sure Sam?”

“100% Cap'n, I even double checked the course projections with CnC, but the jobs-worth fart over there said they were anomaly's, nothing to check out, but look here, there are nearly 200 tracks covering all aspects of the system, these 5 are new tracks and are extending with each sensor sweep, and look here, this track went on a direct course to where Admiral Dax went missing and the degradation of the track from solar wind and passing merch and military shipping puts it in the vicinity of when we know the abduction took place, it HAS to be them Ma'am!”

Commander Precious Armitage looked at her scanner tech and was momentarily lost as to what to do, blow off the manoeuvres and charge after the unknowns, or wait and see, well, she hadn't got this far by playing it safe.

“Ok Sam,” she said, “lets see how this plays out. Please go to full active military scanning concentrate on those 5 tracks, I need you to feed all movements to Tactical as they won't be getting live feeds if the 'puters are showing them as anomalies.”

“Helm,” she called as she moved back to the command chair, “full military power to the Impulse drive, I want to be able to turn this tub on a coin, comm's send a full data dump of Sam's findings, include the name of CnC tech who palmed this off as nothing and send it to CnC and the Daedalus and Prince William, code theta.”

There was a collective intake of breath as a Code Theta meant Commander Precious Armitage had just flagged all the comms to the Prelate for dispatch to the Emperor.

Precious took one final deep, deep breath and then formally stated “All hands to action stations”

And then all hell broke loose at the wailing ululation of the battle stations alarm.

“Ow, bitch that hurt!” cried scanner tech Stafford as HMS Vincent went to full military scanning and increased her drive output to 100%, momentarily overloading the holo, blinding and deafening the unsuspecting tech.

Paul Scuns head whipped round at the curse but before he could question the reasoning the comms section chimed in.

“Dear God, the Vincent is tracking 5 Bogies closing on our position, stealth ships running some sort of Microwave drive, current projections are they are on target for us, Sir, it's repeating on a code Theta!”

Paul didn't hesitate, “Helm give me Z-Axis 20 klicks positive, Y-Axis 5 Klicks Negative, Starboard yaw 90 degrees open up the Port broadside. Tactical tie into the Vincent's scanners and get me a lock on those targets, Stacy get me Captain Gonzalez on the William!”

“He's already on the Link sir, orders from the Alpha Flotilla lead are to attempt to take some prisoners, or at least get as much of the enemy intact for NavInt to learn something.”

“Understood Stacy, Tactical do what you can to minimise damage and stop those ships!”

“Understood Sir,” replied Tac Office Simon, “but I don't know where their weak points are, I may just blow a hole in their reactor cores.”

“Ok Pete, do your best!” Paul replied.

***

Ortega listened to the reports as they came in, the effects of the Vincent's change in status attenuated by the exhaust emissions from the Daedalus, but the content of the report no less deadly. As the Daedalus began to move out of the way Ortega decided some info for NavInt might come in handy and passed the word across the fleet net and all all ships had acknowledged, although several captains had noted that they didn't have a clue what they were shooting at. Still as much information as possible would come in handy.