Snippet #2554836

Engaging in minor conversation for a short while, Korsican stiffened slightly, glancing at the rear blank bulkhead, blinking twice. A holo-comm array subtly extruded and broadcast, generating a holo-panel on which the image a man, his face mostly wrapped in dark cloth but for his eyes. The flesh around them seemed distorted, twisted by flash burns and what appeared to be scars from a very, very brief exposure to vacuum, the dark lines of once ruptured veins and capillaries still visible. His voice was rasping, like that of a lifelong smoker. "A pleasure, Admiral Arlan. My name is Vice Admiral Jenovan Grieves. I've been informed you'd like to speak with us with the goals of establishing positive, profitable relations."

Jovis and Jester remained silent, allowing the much senior superior of theirs to direct the dialogue for a time. It was chance that Grieves remained on Terra, pending dialogue with the TNG for much the same purposes, yet quite appropriate for the subject content. He was a Vice Admiral more by choice than anything else, too useful in active service to relegate his talents to that of a paper pusher and distant strategist. Yet his experience was enough that his word was held of critical importance to many of the upper Admiralty, and his connections to several of the Council of Thirteen rendered him further a choice asset for the negotiations.

---

Sensor Operations growled in unison as suddenly flares of signatures began to ignite and scatter chaff across the spectrums, splitting their sum total into two simultaneous task forces running in tandem. The team assigned to the apparent tramp freighter quickly adjusted to isolate the ship's generated signatures, marking the effects and keeping a steady pace. The corrections they made were routed to team two, eliminating the static feed over their more focused work to relocate the second ghost signature.

>This little shit. What are they playing at?<
>Darwinism. Get S.O. to kick a flight of vampires out to kindly tell him to fuck off.<
>Sound plan.<

Meanwhile, the second team exchanged neural curses as they started through the spectrums again, playing with the interference data in idle hopes of seeing a skew brought on by the suspected second ship. At a reduced capacity, the team was still sifting through the enormous area with greater speed that single AI controlled sweeps were capable of. Deeming it necessary, a ping was sent to the Agency contingent on board, a simple request for telepathic sweeps. A scant few minutes after that, psionics securely in place of the powered Psycho-Amp spheres threaded into the ship's superstructure stretched their magnified minds, linking to form a conglomeration greater than the sum of its parts. After synchronizing, stabilizing the greater meld they formed, the new linked mind network cast its psychic silhouette into the dark void, an intangible, undetectable net of mental energy hunting for living minds. Reaching out to a decided maximum of 750,000 kilometers distant, the broad sweep of the space around it concurred with the continued electronic hunting of the elusive quarry.

Fire Control continued to maintain a slow, steady pan, slowly revolving bores tracking across. They ranged from the newly outdated Triumphant 500mm H.SHOCK heavy gauss cannons, to the looming, 500m bores of the menacing 3m Abyss MK I. Though considering outmoded, the 20km bulk of the Ouroboros-pattern Supercruiser still packed a massive amount of firepower that exceeded the immediate output of the new production lines, if at significantly slower rates.

Far stern and starboard, a bay cycled open, a small stream of, yet again, older fighters slipped free. Resembling the tip point of a trident, the snubfighters were the 7.5m long Mosquito. Where the newer version, the Dragoon, used a single, newer gravity drive for propulsion, the Mosquito used a pair in either "wing". Bearing ship-to-escort, relatively short ranged HESH missiles, their primary armament, quartet 2mm Hellbores were quite sufficient for bringing down even a corvette 20 times their size through massed volleys. Flickering quickly clear of their mammoth mothership, the 9 man squadron broke into three groups, adopting differing intercept vectors for the Solitude. Despite the larger ship's stealthing measures, the pilots were inexplicable homing on their target, via burst laser transmissions directed back and forth from the tasked sensor crew to the pilots, buckled into their cockpits, operating the fighters through a heuristic neural link to the vessel's more limited snubfighter AIs.