Shelby 8 Snippet 4

 

Chapter 3

 

New Tau Metropolis

 

Fred Muggs continued to work to coordinate the upcoming peace talks. It was still tricky; they had to send signals to the nearest ansible and then use their hack into the Confed network. He was working with Dela and some of the negotiators that remained in the capital to get a general outline going.

ONI wasn’t happy about the exposure so the data bandwidth was restricted. Apparently ONI didn’t want the Confeds to know where the Fed ansible was. It delayed the talks. With the chaos in the Confederation, that might be considered a good thing at the moment, however.

The navy was moving ansibles in to make the communications easier. He was relieved by that. At the moment, they had too much of a break between conversations. A basic outline of the peace treaty had been sent but there were errors in communication.

It was rather frustrating, especially since the outline and details kept changing on his side. It seemed the Federation Congress didn’t know what it wanted to do either. The State Department had several outlines to work from, one dictated by Admiral Irons which was the bare minimum terms they were willing to accept.

He’d pointed out that they had problems communicating that to the other side. Unfortunately, that had opened up a can of worms for him. More teams had been sent courtesy of the gate and fast couriers to the capital. Additional personnel were in the pipeline as well. Secretary Moira Sema herself was to come to sign the accords once they were hammered out and voted on.

They had already agreed for her and a delegation to travel into Confederation space to do so in a big publicity thing. He had been told he would be allowed to go as well.

Before the bigwigs could come they had to get the document pounded out, however. They also needed to do their homework and prep work. That meant a stand down of all military forces and an exchange of prisoners. Also clearance for the attorney general’s agents and prosecutors to investigate war crimes. Among many other things, he thought with a rueful slight shake of his head.

Parties of personnel and ships would have to go in to oversee the Confederation stand down and report back. That was already in the works. Reparations were an issue he was still working on. The Confederation wanted their ships back too. The navy refused; they had those ships and would not give them back until after the peace treaty was signed, sealed, and delivered.

He didn’t blame them, not one iota. As much as he wanted to trust some of the Confederation, you didn’t hand over warships to an enemy who had been shooting at you not so long ago. Especially not when those same ships had valuable intelligence in their computers that could potentially be used against his people.

He had been sent additional negotiation teams. Instead of using them with the Confederation, he’d dispatched a few of them to worlds like Stunning Sunsets, TauG9-77, and Sparkling Seas to negotiate for the Tauren prisoners there. They were to oversee the process. At the moment, the navy was only willing to do a one-for-one trade and only release nonthreatening Taurens who had no command experience or had not been accused of war crimes.

He grimaced at that. War crimes were one of many thorny issues he had to deal with. Still on the subject of reparations, he’d asked for the simple return of the Pele refugees. That had apparently opened a can of worms that had yet to be unraveled.

Just before the war the Federation had agreed to evacuate the survivors of Pele, a volcanic world that was slowly being consumed by its own overactive volcanism. The population had been reduced to fifty-five thousand souls. It had taken time for his staff to find a world willing to accept them. They’d found that world in TauG9-77. Three ships had been dispatched to pick up the survivors and place them into stasis. They had meager belongings but had been promised credits to restart their lives on a series of islands on TauG9-77.

TauG9-77 in turn would get additional tax credits for taking in the refugees and had negotiated for a group of engineering teams. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Spacebees had sent units to the world to help them rebuild and upgrade to a higher desired status.

Just as the refugee ships had arrived the Taurens had crossed the border and invaded. They had captured the ships and invaded the planet. They’d bit off more than they could chew with the invasion, however. Despite their low numbers, the engineers and military units had fought a brilliant guerillas campaign that had brutally torn to shreds some of the Taurens’ best army units.

In fact, he had to wonder if that defensive action had been one reason that the Taurens had stalled on their offense for so long. It probably hurt them more than they were willing to admit. They’d stuck their massive hands into what they’d expected to be a soft, easily conquerable world and instead stuck that hand into a meat grinder.

He sniffed at himself.

Somewhere along the way the three captured ships had been sent with their contents of refugees to Confederation space. There things got a bit murky.

He had reports from ONI that the three ships had been spotted in use by the Confederation. The crew and passengers were MIA, however. He worried that they were dead. If they were, there would be hell to pay.

Hopefully not. Hopefully, someone had been wise enough to stick those poor benighted souls in some warehouse in their pods until their sticky situation could be resolved. Hopefully, he thought with a shake of his head. But until they figured it out, it was one thing among many he needed to work out.

It was a saying in his department that sometimes the simplest things were the most complex to work out. Negotiations took time, and they took a lot of patience and trust.

Still, it would be nice to get those people home. They’d suffered enough and getting them released would be another step in the right direction to finally resolving the conflict and putting the war behind them.

On the other side of things, they had the POWS as well as control of Federation space to deal with. Also, worlds like Stunning Sunsets that had not formally joined the Federation and then independent worlds like Tau-FRX76 and Tau-2X78 which had been in early talks to join the Federation but those talks had stalled when the Taurens had triggered their fifth column of activists to take control.

He shook his head and ran a hand through the fur on the top of his head. Still there, he thought moodily. The thought of the fifth column people had brought up an issue with the Confederation, what to do with those spies. ONI and the other agencies had yet to identify them all, let alone round them up.

Someone in Confederation space wanted them as leverage against the POWs and their own citizens who wanted out of Confed space. That was another thorny issue he had yet to figure out.

One among many, he thought with a resigned shake of his head. But, the old maxim was still true to this day, he thought. “If we are talking, we’re not shooting at each other. And I’ll take that any day,” he murmured to himself.

“Sir, don’t forget the mixer tonight. It is in an hour,” his chief of staff said in a text.

He grunted and then shook himself before rising out of his chair. He typed out a response that he was going to go change and collect his wife and then he’d show up.

“Knowing her we’ll be fashionably late as usual,” he said.

“Well, I’m not holding dinner. It’s New Texas beef. I’m looking forward to it,” came the response.

Fred chuckled and felt his mouth water a little in response. The only thing that would get him really going was bush baby. For some reason, his kind still had a thing for it even all these centuries away from their ancient ancestors.

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Phoebe smiled as she clung to her son’s arm. Ayumu wasn’t going to be with her much longer. His leave was nearly up and he was being transferred to his next assignment. He hadn’t talked about it much though, probably not to distress her.

She smiled to him. He looked dashing in his crisp naval uniform. So formal, so handsome. She had hopes that he’d find someone to pique his interest at the dinner parties. So far no luck on that score. Pity.

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Ayumu fought to tug a finger in his collar. His mother might like him dressed up to the nines in his formal uniform but he hated the damn thing. He had worn the thing more in the past month than he had in his time at the academy. He was starting to regret coming home for leave.

He nodded politely to Commander Dolly Merhall. The Neocollie was one of several officers that had been asked to attend the mixer. She looked more comfortable than he was, but then again she was a female and also older. As a senior officer, she probably had more experience with such things.

He on the other hand was a junior officer who was more likely to be told to keep his trap shut and pass the canapés over being included in the conversations.

He knew his mother meant well, but honestly, he was pretty sure they were wasting their time. But he did it for her since she wanted to preen and show him off.

Not much longer though, he thought as he checked his internal clock. Another two hours and he could beg off and slip away to get out of the monkey suit and play Shards, a new shooter he’d gotten into lately.

Hell, he might even do it in his buck ass fur just to unwind. A bottle of suds, some fun … his mouth started to water in anticipation.

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