No medals for crate killers

We were given orders to attack an NTF depot and given the usual speech as how it might not win any medals, but will help in strangling enemy supplies. A ship short on weapons is pretty useless in a firefight. I thought that it would be a nice change of pace from the harrowing baptism by fire we had yesterday, but I was wrong. So wrong. And this mission is where things started going weird for a lot of reasons. I don't know if I'll be able to write about what I've seen here, but I'm recording it anyway for myself to help sort out what the hell might be going on.

The depot was located in a small asteroid field and was like most any other I've seen before when chasing down pirates and raiders on the frontier, a bunch of containers floating in space and protected by a few static defenses like turrets. A few Loki-class fighters from the NTF engaged us, but things began going south when Beta wing couldn't complete their scans of the cargo. Every container was shielded for some reason. I should have known something wasn't right at that point, but we still had a job to do. After clearing out the fighters and destroying the containers, we got word that there was a strange energy signature deeper in the field so we went to investigate it. It turns out that the NTF had a hidden base built into one of the asteroids and we were told to clear out the fighters for the bombers that would be arriving.

And that's when we received a communication from Admiral Bosch.

That's right...THE Admiral Bosch of the NTF, rebel leader and traitor to the GTVA. He was on the base! But that wasn't the end of the surprises. Command denied that he was onboard and said that he was elsewhere, but we knew damn well who we were hearing over our headsets. He was trying to negotiate for the safety of the base by agreeing to pull his forces from Deneb, in effect, giving up an entire system for one base. Whatever was on there must have been incredibly important for him to suddenly decide to sacrifice the battle there.

But Command didn't want to hear any of it and ordered us to destroy the base anyway. That's when it burst open, revealing a frigate hidden inside of it. It activated its jump drive and escaped before we could do anything else, but Bosch left us with an ominous warning that what he was doing would be the key to saving humanity. Whether or not any of us believed it was quickly swept under the rug by Command that quickly ordered us back home for debrief.

Back on the Aquitaine, we were all told not to discuss what we had witnessed at the depot and everything was classified top secret...like this personal journal that we're told to keep. After Lt. Loukakis was done with us, I saw Admiral Petrarch, the ship's commander, Gloval, and several other officers come in as we were filing out, closing the door behind them. While playing poker, Takeda had come down as he usually does, but his face wasn't the calm facade of an intelligence officer that we had gotten used to. He looked a little ashen and we asked, off the record of course, if it had anything to do with Bosch being somewhere else he wasn't supposed to be.

He whispered back that HQ was just as puzzled as anyone else, but they had managed to recover a few materials from the depot strike. He couldn't say what they found, but apparently, it was considered incredibly important that they sealed off one of the cargo rooms in the lower decks where they were stored and placed it on 24 hour guard...under the Admiral's direct orders. He couldn't say anymore than that, only that they were to treat this incident as if it had never happened.

It didn't take long for Wilkins to start yammering about Shivans and for Studi to shut him up by robbing him, and the rest of us, blind with a full house. I swear, that guy has the perfect poker face.