Tauren Invasion 5

 Sitrep:

First off, this was cool:

 I've seen them 3 times in person and countless times from my house. I still get a kick out of them flying over and rattling the windows. :)

I wish some of the other photos had come out. Oh well, next time!

Second: Goodlifeguide got Tauren Invasion back to me this morning. I will work on publishing it tomorrow.

On to the last snippet!

Chapter 5

 

Lebynthos

 

Lieutenant O'Hara scowled as she read the latest report. The army and marine intelligence officers and staff, what little they had of them in the sector had been tapped along with army and marine squads to help Federation law enforcement to track down Tauren spies. FIS and FBI and other agencies were of course involved. They were also tapped to track the enemy's lines of communication to their hidden ansible platforms in some of the star systems.

Easier said than done she thought as she scanned the files. A big part of the problem was that she was one person on one planet. There had been a handful of students who had studied intelligence with the Marines but none had her level of training. To her chagrin she was the senior military intelligence officer in the entire sector. Well, the ground forces one, the spook in charge of the navy side was busy trying to get a handle on the Confederation space tech and industry.

The idea that she was the head of Marine and army intelligence in an entire sector was both a heady and scary prospect for her career. It meant everything was coming down to her. Luckily, she was just one cog in a greater machine; law enforcement and the civilian spook agencies were taking the lead in the hunts.

That was fine with her; she was trained to find spies but only during a combat or occupation situation. Finding embedded spies was a different sort of animal. They still leaned in her direction though, primarily because many were learning on the job and it was a daunting task to find so many spy cells scattered across the sector.

Fortunately, they had a starting point, something she'd pointed out to every spook and law enforcement she'd spoken with in conferences. Getting them over the idea of it being impossible had taken time.

Many of the planets lacked any sort of tracking on their immigration and definitely not going back generations. That meant they had to get creative. Where others had wrung their hands in frustration, she had taken the second half of their mission and put it first.

The embedded spies had to be communicating somehow after all. They either had drops to a channel out of the star system to one that had an ansible, or they had an ansible in the star system to communicate with. They were useless if they couldn't get their intel out in a timely manner.

Finding those lines of communication were therefore key to finding the spies. Which meant looking for the communication systems.

She'd worked with the communication techs over the course of a week to get a general idea on what they should be looking for.

They had started with a system that could find a spot in space and transmit a signal to it. The signal had to be strong enough to punch through an atmosphere on a planet. Most likely the transmissions were short, pulse laser or narrow band burst transmissions. Encrypted obviously.

In a star system that had no space presence, the spies had to be on the ground obviously. Which meant they had to transmit the signal through the atmosphere to a specific spot in the night sky as the planet rotated, and rotated around its parent star. The ansible platform was orbiting somewhere too but passively, and it had to be in space that was clear of anything that might hit and hurt it.

Back to the ground side part of the equation, all of the communication equipment and the sensor equipment to find the ansible had to have computer support and all of that meant power. Hydro, solar, wind, whatever—it meant a power fingerprint.

Those things gave them an initial list of things to look for. They took it a step further in looking at what it would take to transmit a signal and where that signal could go. That was when someone brought in a navy spook briefly.

The ONI spook had pointed out that the ansible platform was most likely well off the established jump points since if they were close they might be spotted by a ship. Unless they were completely solar powered, they had to have some sort of nuclear power, either fission or fusion. They could supplement their power with solar, but that would give away a reflective presence.

Nuclear meant neutrino spoor for the navy to find. It also meant onboard computers and most likely a self-destruct package. But it also meant at some point the platform had to be maintained by a visiting ship.

That had led to speculation about the maintenance ship. The navy was looking into that and trying to pull records of ships was a fun thing she was gratefully not involved in. They had a database to compare it to though, one compiled to get a handle on interstellar traffic and identify pirate activity. Hopefully, something nice would come out of that, though she had her doubts.

There was a hit though recently, several and one solid lead. The picket in the Platte Cluster had found a platform. The navy and spooks were handling the platform. There wasn't much said about that side. They had intercepted a series of signals to the platform and were busy decoding the signals. Better still, federal law enforcement was en route from the Trajan cluster.

The navy had pinpointed a series of targets on the planet. A recon drone had been deployed in orbit, and they had identified a mountain home with a larger than normal energy signature that was transmitting signals to the platform.

At the moment, they were hands off. The orders from on high were to monitor the coming and going from the cabin and get IDs on everyone involved.

There had been no hits in Delos and Samos but a promising lead in Mykonos. That led to a bit of frustration; it was one jump away from her and only two jumps from the capital. It was also one jump from Tortuga. The navy wanted that source cocooned quickly, no doubt because whoever was there might be passing on intel about convoys to and from Tortuga.

The biggest problem was that they didn't have enough agents and teams to go around. There were federal agents on some of the larger populace star systems, but not many agents, and those that were there were involved in their own spy hunts, not to mention other cases.

She had a sneaking suspicion that the powers that be were scratching their heads on how to do something about this situation. They couldn't just ship people from Rho in either, which meant in-house. So, in a couple of months she expected that she might get tapped to travel again.

Until then she would do the best she could, which meant watching from afar and giving advice and looking for needles in very big piles of hay scattered across the sector.

~~{}~~

Captain JG Mya Halice read the latest report and nodded. From the look of the exit polling, Sparkling Seas was taking itself out of the running for the Pele refugees. That was fine. She had a backup plan in place. As soon as the vote was official, she'd execute it and redirect the platoon and team to 77. If they timed their arrival right, they would get there a week to a month prior to the arrival of the refugee ships.

That was, if the ships were loaded in a timely manner. They were still en route to Pele and wouldn't be there for weeks, and knowing civilians they'd want to pack everything up to and including the kitchen sink for sentimental reasons or tradition or an heirloom or whatever.

She didn't care. Honestly, there were enough ships to hopefully handle the load. They had a set weight and size limit on cargo though, and the community leaders had agreed to it in advance.

She felt for those people, but hopefully, once they were landed in a new home, the spirits would be kinder to them.

In the meantime, she still had the preparations for war to contend with. The Army Corps of Engineers had dispatched teams to work on evacuation centers and plans. The official reason was to help with natural disasters and they were going to stick doggedly to that cover story for as long as possible.

It didn't hurt that it was true. The primary purpose of those places would be to be used in case of a natural disaster such as a hurricane, wildfire, flood, or whatever. The threat of war was still just that, a threat.

Best to be prepared, she reminded herself before digging through the reports. Getting her people into position to make something of a difference was a big issue at the moment. Getting people to take the plan seriously was second.

The evacuation centers were supposed to be a funding match program. So far the governors had yet to come up with their side of the funding. She had a sneaking suspicion they were going to play fast and loose and then expect the Federation to take up the slack. When the shit hit the fan, if, she reminded herself, they'd whine and boo-hoo and the Feds would have to fund the rest.

She shook her head. Sometimes she really hated politics.

~~{}~~