Chapter 3: Exile

Deep Space Alpha, Location Top Secret

Sensors aboard the massive array registered spatial distortions prior to the Slip portal opening 200,000 kilometres to starboard. Once the portal was fully established, the ICSF Starcruiser Perseus burst into space. The AI governing the sensor array, recognised the Perseus and acknowledged the IFF beacon and immediately began reporting sensor readings in the massive volume of space monitored by the top secret array.

On board the huge ship, Manx, Juno and Alica were reviewing status reports provided by sector chiefs, and the news was mixed. After 4 weeks of escape and evade with the Shadows, the great ship was no longer in pristine condition, the 1500 metre length of the hull was pockmarked by explosions where Shadow AM missiles had impacted and weapon emplacements had exploded and scored by hits from energy weapons when the shields overloaded. The skeleton crew on board to run the readiness trials were tired, they had been pulling double shifts for the full 4 weeks and needed some down time, which was the reason for stopping at the sensor array, not only was it a location unknown to any of the Shadow patsies on the COC, the incredible scanning range would give them adequate warning of any approaching Shadow fleets, to allow them to move to a new location. Damage assessments showed 20 percent of weapons off-line, 10 percent of shield generators off-line, meaning overall shield efficiency was compromised until the generators could be repaired, hull breaches on decks 15, 33, 35, 40 and 42.

Analysis of sensor readings provided by the governing AI on Deep Space Alpha did show that they now had some leeway to allow repair drones to begin the most urgent repairs, lower alert level and allow the crew to gain some rest. After some further debate, repairs were prioritised and a schedule was drawn up to allow the maximum amount of downtime for the crew, without affecting the effectiveness of battle response time. The repair schedule called for the hull breaches to be worked on first, as any sudden stress could increase the size of the breaches and begin to affect structural integrity of the ship, under optimal circumstances, with access to a full repair crew and full space-dock, the repairs would take a maximum of 3 shifts, however, out here with no repair crew, and the repair drones relying on ships replicators to fabricate the necessary parts, the repairs were scheduled to take 4 days, after this, it would take approximately a day and a half to repair and replace the damaged shield generators in order to bring shields back to full strength. Unfortunately, nothing could be done to replace the lost weapons emplacements, as they required more specialist parts, which could not be fabricated by the ship replicators. This repair schedule meant that the ship required a minimum of 6 days respite from the incessant attacks by the Shadows, which, if Juno's latest ploy worked, they may finally have.

After the meeting broke up, Juno headed to his workroom to check on the progress of his little toy. Sitting in front of a massive screen showing the current sensor readings gathered by Deep Space Alpha, he could see that things appeared to be running smoothly, however, he would not know whether it worked for another few hours. Alica walked in 20 minutes later to find him deep in thought, ruminating over the events of the past 4 weeks.

It all began innocuously enough, with the detection of a slip drone on rendezvous course with the Perseus, this was followed closely however, by 2 more sinister events, the first of which was the detection of a shadow fleet on the outskirts of the Antelia system. The second event resulted in a rather hasty departure from the Antelia sector, before the contents of the slip drone could be examined; this event was of course the visual record of the demise of the Antelia Sector fleet in a massive one-sided confrontation with the Shadows. It emerged during the communiqué, that the targeting computers for all current fleet ships, including fighters and bombers, had been compromised in such a way that like the sabotage to the sensor arrays throughout the empire, they could not detect the shadow craft, as a result, the fleet was wiped out with little discernible damage to the Shadow fleet.

Having anticipated the need for a quick exit from any of the systems visited by the Perseus since Juno activated the Madman Protocol, Manx had had various exit routes programmed into the nav-comp, each using multiple slip jumps before reaching the final location. The route programmed from this system took them through 5 unclaimed, uninhabited territories before finally arriving in orbit around Out System 0 in the Alteria system, and once the slip drone had been recovered, Manx ordered the program to be initiated. 2 hours later, the Perseus was making preparations for the final slip into the Alteria system, and Manx had everyone prepared for an emergency stop at Zero in order to have the targeting systems tested, and to get the information out to Fleet Command in order to try and minimise confrontations until all ships could have their scanners and weapons re-calibrated to increase effectiveness against the Shadow fleet.

Manx's preparations were cut short as the countdown reached 0, the slip portal opened and the Perseus slipped into hell, all that remained of the huge asteroid which had housed the station was a hulk of twisted metal and shattered rock, slowly orbiting the massive heavy metal core which once hosted the power system for the base and provided shielding for Veritas, the base AI. Upon seeing the devastation before them, Manx ordered full shields and stealth, with a full power sensor sweep of surrounding space to ascertain the current level of Shadow presence in system.

Whilst long-range sensors were running a full power sweep, the short-range array was focused upon the wreckage of Out System 0 in an effort to salvage anything of use, and in a vain search for survivors, whilst the search turned up the expected results when it came to survivors, low power readings were detected from the vicinity of the AI core. Manx dispatched a SAR drone to evaluate the readings and to recover any viable part of the core, whilst he had Perseus moved to a position, which was more protected, from sensor sweeps and at less danger from the debris field, whilst not compromising their ability to recover the drone and fight if need be. The limited AI on the drone reported that it had managed to recover the majority of the core from the debris and was on its way back to the Perseus, when sensors reported 2 solid hits from Shadow vessels, and calculated that there would not be enough time to recover the drone, cycle the Slip engines and escape before they were in range to attack.

Manx ordered all crew to battle stations and all fighter squadrons to standby, then he sent one of each type of fighter he had available out of the ship to determine if they could detect the oncoming ships. It soon became apparent that the Rapier, Scimitar and Claidhmore fighters from Gemini base could detect the craft and the Spadroons from Golan's battle group could not, so it would appear that the saboteurs who had managed to infiltrate the refit crews, had not managed to infiltrate the top secret design yards used by Juno to build his prototypes, now all that needed clarification was whether the targeting systems on Perseus and the fighters could track the Shadow craft to allow them to defend themselves from attack. That question was answered a short time later when the Shadow craft came within range of the Perseus' mighty offensive batteries and the targeting computer immediately started calculating firing solutions, in order to maximise surprise and minimise the chances of one of the vessels escaping to report the existence of something which could fight back, Manx decided to play possum and act as though he had no idea that the Shadow vessels were approaching. The only misgivings he had were that he had no idea of the range of the Shadow weapons, or their effectiveness, but this was a risk he was willing to take in order to minimise his risk of exposure, so he calculated a position midway between the maximum effective range of current weapons and maximum range of the Perseus' weapons and ordered full spread of fire once the Shadow vessels reached that point.

The plan as it was, went off without a hitch, the Shadow vessels approached secure in the knowledge that they could not be seen or targeted by the strange ICF ship so enticingly in front of them, until at the pre-designated point, 2 squadrons of fighters erupted from Perseus' launch bays, and at a signal from Manx, all fighters, bombers and all of Perseus' long range offensive weapons opened up at the same time, simultaneously targeting both Shadow vessels. Whether the opposing craft had shields up at full strength, off-line or somewhere in-between was indeterminate, what was verifiable though was that the combined volley from all of Perseus' offensive weapons was enough to obliterate both Shadow vessels, further analysis would show that the craft did have shields up but strength was unknown, and that Perseus could have taken out a battle group worth of such craft, but not as convincingly, and certainly not with zero damage to himself. Battle analysis would have to wait though as sensors indicated a large Shadow fleet approaching the system. Manx immediately ordered Slip engines to full and course plotted to a point midway between Alteria and the next closest core system.

Once the ship was relatively safe in interstellar space, Manx ordered a review of the last skirmish and a full damage assessment for the Perseus. Once the assessments were complete, Manx called a meeting of all department heads to review the findings, and also to plot a course of action, as it would appear that the Shadow advance had already swept through the outer core. Juno took it upon himself to review all sensor readings from the contacts with the Shadows, to try and ascertain ship analogues and determine weak points to target if and when they find themselves in a situation where they are out gunned and need to get out as quickly and efficiently as possible. Alica's task was two fold, firstly she had to get the Spadroons from Golan's battle group reprogrammed in both sensor and targeting systems, so that all of the Perseus' small ship defence was at full strength and able to deal out damage to the enemy, secondly, she had to examine the recovered AI core from Out System 0 and determine how much was salvageable and if it would be worth the effort. Navigation was tasked with calculating numerous Slip escapes from the various core systems and several minor outlying systems also. The meeting was broken up by an urgent message from sensors advising that again there was a Shadow fleet entering maximum sensor range, at present it was impossible to determine whether the response matched that of the fleet detected approaching Alteria or whether this was a different fleet entirely, either way the prognosis was worrying, the first outcome would be that if this was the same fleet, then they could somehow detect the Perseus even after a Slip, and they can travel at speeds exceeding 10 times that of maximum plus-light capabilities of current Imperial Fleet front-line ships, alternately if this was a different fleet, then they had more ships in Calderian space than previous estimates, a hell of a lot more. No matter at the moment, the meeting immediately broke up and a 2^nd emergency Slip was activated.

The following 3 weeks proved that Manx was correct to be ultra cautious in that first meeting, they had lost count of the number of times they had slipped into a situation where they had to fight their way out, and even when they had emerged in the clear, they could not stay in one place for too long before a fleet or battle group appeared on sensors. After the first few occasions where they had to run after detecting an enemy fleet vastly superior than their capability to fight, Manx became suspicious that there was in some way or other, something about the Perseus that was detectable and allowing the Shadow fleets to home in on their position. As all departments began exhaustive checks to determine if this hypothesis was correct, a maintenance tech running diagnostics on a faulty comms console stumbled across the answer — the console was not faulty, it was an unused test system which was supposed to lead to a full scale test of proposed slip communication system, but the scientists at Out System 0 had never been able to get the thing to work, now however, it was switched off as it was constantly emitting a low level harmonic pulse, the tech determined that the console was actually working and was in fact receiving a slip space communication signal.

Using the schematics for the console as a base, several hand held detectors were fabricated and used to triangulate the source of the signal to the probe retrieved from Gemini, it would appear to be an automated SOS beacon designed to allow the Shadows to retrieve any of their tech to stop it from falling into alien hands. Now that they knew how the enemy were locating them, they had to decide how they were to proceed, after all, the probe proved to be the best chance they had to crack some of the Shadow tech, but if no way could be found to eliminate or at least mask the signal, then they would have to get rid of the probe or constantly be on the lookout for the next Shadow fleet. 3 days passed with nothing to show for their attempts at hiding the signal so it was reluctantly agreed that the probe would need to be destroyed, Juno however put forward another option, rather than destroy the probe with who knew what consequences, he proposed attaching the probe to a Slip drone with a sensor deceiver, and sending it off towards the Galactic Rim at an oblique angle from their true line of escape, theorising that when the Shadows caught the drone and compared its location to the previously noted locations, they would assume that the Perseus had fled at 180 degrees from the current line of flight, and search for them along that line, whereas in actuality, they would be nowhere near that supposed flight path.

Manx gave him the go ahead and he immediately pulled together a team of his best engineers to retrofit a Slip drone with enough cargo space for the probe and to modify the FOF transmitter to broadcast the sensor shadow of the Perseus. One of the engineers came up with the idea to include enough grav-plating that when overloaded, it would mimic the mass shadow of the Perseus also, as they did not know how the Shadow sensor system worked. Within a matter of hours, the decoy drone was ready and programmed with a list of Slip co-ordinates, and a self destruct which would automatically trigger if sensors detected anything other than vacuum outside the craft after the first Slip. Of course this left the command staff with a big decision to make, where in space would it be safe to lie low, carry out repairs and get some down time from the constant double shifts and Battle Alert status they had been running under?

Only one place in known space was deemed safe enough which was why a matter of hours later found the Perseus on station in orbit around Deep Space Alpha. Juno came out of his contemplation to find Alica standing just inside the door, "Oh, hi dear, sorry I didn't hear you come in. Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Yes," replied Alica, " you can switch off that console and come to bed, you have spent more time on duty in the past four weeks than any other crew member, including Manx, and that man is a workaholic."

"I'm sorry dear, but I have to make sure that this works, and that we are safe enough to begin repairs."

"That has already been decided Juno, Manx has decreed that sensor logs from Alpha, combined with current readings, show no Shadow presence in local space. The current nearest fleet is at least 3 days away at 15x plus-light, the best we have ever measured them at is just over 10x, and comparing the readings over the past 10 hours shows this fleet moving away from us. So even if this fleet were approaching, we have time to get the most necessary of the hull breaches repaired and to begin on repairing and replacing damaged systems throughout the ship. I have your top man, who has already had some downtime by the way, ready to take over monitoring the decoy systems and have assurances that he will contact you if there is even the slightest deviance from the plan. So get your butt out of that chair and follow me to bed now, or I will have Perseus lock you out of the systems until you can do nothing else but go to bed."

Knowing that she would do exactly as she threatened to do, Juno handed the station over to his 2^nd and headed for the first full rest period he had had in 4 weeks. He was surprised when he awoke 11 hours later rather than the 8 hours designated as the rest period, but he did not complain as he took a quick sonic shower, as he was feeling better than he had done in a long time. After the shower and a bite to eat, he headed for the bridge to speak to Manx regarding the Slip Drone they had picked up when they began running all those weeks ago. Not finding him on the bridge, he wasn't surprised to learn that Manx had had the drone moved to the main conference room and was awaiting his arrival before opening it.

Arriving at the conference room, he was surprised to find only Manx there, "Just us?" he asked.

"No," replied Manx, "I'm waiting for Alica as well. I thought that considering the likely source of a drone broadcasting Imperial recognition codes, not fleet, that it would be best if only the 2 of you were present to open it, and then dependant upon the contents, you can advise whomever you feel should be aware of your findings."

"No, stay," urged Alica, who had entered during this exchange. "Considering what we found when we passed through the Throneworld system, I think we all have a fair idea what this drone contains, and I for one don't want to exclude you from any decisions we need to make after we listen to whatever message is recorded."

"I agree," said Juno. "It is likely that we are currently the only surviving free members of the Calderian people and I am not about to exclude a valued and trusted companion from something which may provide us valuable information in our attempt to stay free. Saying this, he opened the drone to find a sealed courier box, rather than the message disk he was expecting. Lifting the box triggered a warning that the correct Imperial authorisation code must be entered or the contents of the box would be vaporised. Juno carried the box over to the conference table, provided the correct Imperial authorisation and opened the box, only to fall back in shock as he observed the contents. Recovering as both Manx and Alica rushed to him, he reached into the box and picked up the two objects which had caused him to recoil, one was a simple ovoid plaque about 6 inches on the long axis by 3.5 on the short, and the 2^nd object was a simple headband.

Realising what her husband held, Alica gasped, whilst Manx just stared blankly, not getting why the young couple were so troubled by two simple objects and wondering why they were placed in such and important courier box under such security. His confusion increased further when Alica looked at Juno with tears in her eyes and said, "It's over isn't it? They're all gone, everyone, our whole family dead."

"I'm afraid it looks that way dear, there is no way these would have been sent to us, especially after our declaration last year, if there was anyone left."

Seeing the confusion on Manx's face, Juno turned to him and started to explain, "What I currently have in my hands are not the simple objects they appear, if it weren't for our abdication last year when it came time for us to take up our public duties, you would know instantly what I hold. You see, these artefacts were crafted using ancient tech which we still barely understand, and each member of the Imperial family has a biometric crystal embedded at the base of their skull, which interfaces with this tech, identifying them as permitted users, however once we abdicated last year, Alica and I had our crystals de-activated, and as such cannot interface with the tech inside these artefacts to initiate the required metamorphosis. There is a message disk in the box which I hope will explain why they have been sent to us, but like Alica, I fear this means that our whole family is dead." As he said this, Juno placed the artefacts (of which Manx was now beginning to have an inkling as to their identity) on the table, turned back to the box, removed the message disk and placed it in the nearest reader. "Perseus, display message on main conference room view screen."

As the 3 took their seats, the main viewscreen activated with an image of Emperor Jonas, and the following message was displayed: