Chapter 2: Trip and Discovery

The story by General Fealia of Deya on finding the humans:

I had been fighting on Mantoya for two years at that point.

Hesta had the main defensive responsibility and we were backing them up with few million troops. The wing that I was part of was a fast response team sent to try to contain any Crey breakthroughs until the Hesta could bring up reserves and regroup from such.

Basically when a breakthrough happened we were airlifted to the site and together with gunships fought a retrograde action trying to make the Crey lose momentum and thus pay time for slower moving Hesta forces to take up new defensive positions. Once the new positions were ready we withdrew to the holding point to wait for next mission.

I was a section lead and a green crest back then. My section was down to 18 effectives out of 49 full strength so we were pulled from the duty.

I thought that we would be reconstituted or merged with some other unit, but instead we were moved to a shuttle pad and told that we were going off-world to Greata for some other mission but no further details.

The shuttle ride and the ship entry were harrowing as always, due to the random Crey fire. They clearly knew approximately where we were even with the stealth systems, but luckily not exactly where.

The trip was on an old Triston class transport with low kilolight engines so the trip took 8 cycles or about 9 standard days as we would now call it.

When we arrived at Greata, we were directed to the front strategic headquarters. There the rest of the section was told to wait in transient quarters, while I was told to go to a meeting with the science command.

In science command I was told that my section remains would form the security and ground combat element of an exploration mission to a distant part of the galaxy. The expedition would be with a converted Leeta class courier. The mission was to find new races to help fight the Crey. The Leeta class was an extremely new class courier then that was only produced in low numbers, but it had megalight engines, so the trip, though far, would not take all that long in between systems.

There would be a total of 41 people on the ship, including my 18 strong section that would be reorganized into two lances.

When I asked about the reason for such a mission in middle of the war, I was told the thing that I had been expecting, that all current projections pointed to us losing the war within 75-150 years regardless of what we did, thus the try to find help.

I was then told to go meet front commander Farbius.

On way there I was wondering why the front commander would want to meet with a lowly section leader, but of course I did as I was told.

On arriving to Farbius office I was immediately sent in. Inside was general Farbius himself and another red crest who was never introduced to me.

General Farbius then told me that the information I was about to receive was restricted and not even discussed with other members of the exploration team. What we would today call top secret – code word. Only the mission commander, second in command, the chief scientist and me would know this thing on the mission and overall less than 30 people anywhere.

The real reason to send the mission was not to get help, as such would most likely take too long to develop and the chance to find any species that could actually help a lot was low, but to instead try to find habitable places far from home, so far that the Crey would not find them all and then start colonies on them.

Even if the Crey could find them from among the billions of possible star systems, it would take them decades to get there as their maximum drive speeds were about 10 kilolights and most of their ships were capable of only few kilolights. It was then that I understood the difference between megalight and kilolight in strategic mobility. As I had been fighting in ground combat, I had never thought about such. For me logistics had always been about enough supplies for my troops to do their job, but this was about the strategic implications of such.