The Black

Four

FOUR

It had been 5:27 seconds since the ship folded into the area of the station. Jol had not seen anything, he had felt the use of large amounts of power, normally what would have been used to move small ships. Then the suddenly all of the limitations on the ships and the station was gone. He felt the displacement of the Guild ship; it was gone, he did not know where, but knew it could not be that far. He looked at his Captain, then said "Sir, I think he has finished, his ship has folded someplace, not far, but gone, and I think you will find that all controls are working properly. :

This is when the various areas started to report normal, undocking had begun, and was continued, the Captain wanted away from the station where they could maneuver and fight if needed, the other two ships of the Flotilla were also getting lose from the station. Jol could sense that the Guild Merchants were also getting lose from the station, and knew that they were going to start moving out system. This was a problem now.

Sub-director Mass was a happy man. His controls were unfrozen, had had been in contact with the Director who was on the way to the Command location. The automated system was allowing the ships to depart as quickly as they cleared with priority to the Federation Warships that were at dock. They were about 5 million kilometers away from the station and moving out, but not toward the Fold Point, but were going toward the planets.

There were now nine people in the Command location, the others had been waiting at the airlock when it opened. He was in communication with ships when needed, and things looked better. Then the older man called. "Sir, you might want to look at this. He pressed a couple of buttons, and said look on your screen."
Mass looked down on his personal screen, and his eyed widened. The recon buoy just outside the national space of the 2d Planet was transmitting an alarm. The 2d Planet had two small moons, one was about 1,800 kilometers in diameter and was almost twice the size of the other, it was called Pesha, which meant something to the locals, he had never bothered to learn it. But the more important part of the view, was the small dots that were expanding out from the moon. There were dozens of them, all were clearly designated ships, but were also not given types, so that the computer did not have the ship type in the register. This was not good. He said, "is this going to the Commodore?"

The older man looked over and said that he had just gotten through to the communications and they were linking even as they were talking. Mass was looking at it and thought of what his Grandmother had said of situations like this. From the Frying pan into the fire.

Jol got the information about the larger moon of the 2d Planet as it came, in he plotted course changes and also began to dig for data on the ships. There were none. This was clearly more Tactical's job, he wanted to know. What made him want to know so badly was the fact that as soon as he had looked to this area he saw nothing. It was like he was looking at a well shielded Task Force from the Federation. This was not good, he did not know of any Guild members on the payroll of the local Government, in fact their entire status with the Guild would have forbid it. He still was listening and looking when he heard the Tactical Officer.

She was a Lt, and she was good at her job, she had to be to pass the tests and get the job. They did not allow politics to get in the selection of Tactical Officers, since they were basically in Command of the ship if there was a fight, it took too long for a Captain to give orders then to be obeyed, the officer would have a lot of independence if there was a fight. His present Captain had never been able to get a tactical position, so he had a lot of patrons to get the Command chair of not just a ship, but a small Task Force.

"Sir, we are picking up 53 ships, they are a wide variety of ship sizes and none are in the database for ship type. We have five that are Battlecruiser size, and from what data we can get on them they seem to be well armed. There are another 10 that are Cruiser size, and 20 that are Destroyer size, and the last 18 are Frigate size. The Destroyers are a little smaller than our ships and seem to carry less missile arms." She stopped still working her console trying to get more data.