The Teragoid Incident

5. Hide and Seek

The NAV suggested a half hour break, in the hopes that everyone could regain their composure, the Captain agreed. When Perez suggested that he was done, and that he could go get ready for watch, the Captain demurred, as in, "No way, Perez, you do not get to drop your box of crap in here and walk the hell out. What we do here, assuming we live, is going to rewrite warfare doctrine for all time. You're going help take the blame for that."

Perez skipped over to the galley and grabbed a cup of coffee. The galley served the Wardroom on one side and crews mess on the other, so there was always a cook in there doing something. Cohen asked the mess cook earlier to get some 'refreshments' for the planning meeting.

"What the hell is this all about," asked the cook.

"I gotta go back in, but I'll give you the complete rundown if you'll feed me before watch," said Perez.

"Deal," said the mess cook.

Perez wandered back into the wardroom conference room and took a seat at the back about eight minutes later, he looked around. Muschivk was up at front, slotting his PIM. The officers were wandering back in, a minute or so past the CO's mark time. The CO hadn't come back yet. Of the thirteen officers on board, ten of them were in the meeting, one was in control, one in engineering, and one sidelined in medical. There were a couple of CPO's he knew to say hi, and some LPO's he knew not at all, strange considering there were only 164 crew and another 100 additional members. The SAR commander was here, and the sector patrol wing commander. Lots more navy than before. Perez self-consciously checked his tunic and lined it up with his pants. He was wearing the working tunic, pants and boots worn by every sailor, but some of these guys were in dress. Weird.

The CO entered and took his seat at the head of the long conference table, which was really 4 tables bolted together. They were going to separate them out into working groups once the briefings were done, or so he heard from the cook. Muschivk said, "Attention on Deck!"

"At ease," said the CO, waving it off.

Muschivk liked to give the appearance of a stickler for the rules, he figured that if he followed all the stupid ones, no one would notice when he pushed one of the really big ones over a cliff. He would bend or break rules and regs for anything he felt worthwhile.

"I'm here to address the current sector intelligence situation overview. Up until about two weeks ago, it was pretty bleak. Now, thanks to Perez and his boys, we have a much bigger bag of tricks to play with. Ahem, " he coughed, "Getting ahead of myself."

Muschivk rumbled on, "I'm going recap here and back up about to about 2 T-years ago. 24 months ago, ships started to disappear in this sector, without a trace. SAR couldn't find any emergence wreckage, no distress buoys, nothing. So Outsystem Intel tried to get some ships out here to do a little snooping, but nothing with any firepower was touched. There are usually little tramp traders and miners, but they all started to avoid the area, and some vanished like the regular shipments. We had no clues, no evidence and no idea what to do about it, except have Outsystem issue a warning. About a year ago, Perez and his advisor, Ching made a breakthrough in some esoteric quantum mechanics that made it seem like we could nano-engineer two structures that would contain a subspace boundary. Or at least I think that's what it says. Regardless, the practical effect was that it would stop or reverse fast neutrinos, the primary mechanism of subspace detection."

"Since I've been babysitting Perez for some 30 years, I found out about this and went to the joint Navy command with a proposal, and that you all know about, because we are sitting in it. This station was unmolested, and only received regular scheduled traffic with the drop off some 35 months ago.. Why? It was first on the list of areas that was being interdicted, and it had to mean something, but what? I have scads of opinions from intel, but none of it is worth squat, because we don't even know the species of the Unknowns."