I take one little sabbatical and look what they do

[Atragon9 0]

A9 was sitting in the conference room of the Pensacola, trying to piece together all of the parts of the puzzle they have wandered into. It has been 45 days since they arrived at Rylos-IX, with backup from the Carthage arriving a week after they did. They are parked outside of a massive temporal distortion that seems to start here and has been mapped all the way back to a small, unremarkable, unmapped and unknown planetoid called Lantas-IV. It had been classified by long range telescope, but no one had visited... they think.

 

This is where a new player in the puzzle game enters the field. There is a missing science vessel, the Utah, that has been missing for as long as the Manticore. Fleet Science Directorate is used to their long-range ships going MIA for months at a time, due to a variety of spatial anomalies they get investigated. It was only as the Carthage was tracing the far edge of this distortion field, and reporting back to the Fed Council that someone high up in SF Science realized that it was the last known location of the Utah AND they had not reported in for 11 months. The Council assured SF SCI that Special Ops would search for the Utah, just so we wouldn't have to deal with a boat full of Squints ((nod of acknowledgement to KK for that term)) possibly muddying up the investigation.

 

Speaking of investigating, those chroniton spikes have normalized in their schedule. In fact, the spikes are extr aordinarily regular, reoccurring every six days, right down to the same minute, each time. We are not sure what would happen to any ships or people caught in the field during the chroniton spikes, but looking back at the last reports of the Utah and the Manticore, it is possible that the two ships have gone through over 50 of these spikes, maybe more.

 

A9 has been in communication with the Consul General and pleaded his case to allow the Pensacola to enter the field to search for participants/survivors/wreckage. For more than a month, he has been turned down. At the same time, he has been working on Captain Bek to see if the Pensacola might be convinced to enter the temporal field even without Fed Council approval. Of the two fronts, the only one that seems to be weakening is the one here, on the Pensacola so, once again, he is on the verge of taking a Special Ops crew into a situation that is against the regulations of even Black Ops. And they wonder why he had spent months in the SF Medical looney bin, hmm? To be fair, he truly had no plan once he could get himself into the temporal field, especially if it affected him and this ship the same way it must be affecting the others already "caught." One quagmire at a time (giggity)