Archive Recording: 08/07/2175
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TROY: Start recording. This is Alexandra Troy, date August 7, 2175. I will be conducting the debrief of source code-named GIDEON. We will be using the English language because I wanted to. Do you have any objections to that, Mr. Gideon?
YONG: My English may not always be the best, but I can make my way in it.
TROY: Fabulous. We will be conducting the complete debrief of GIDEON, who has graciously offered full disclosure on all matters pertinent to the so-called Zaha-Katchem Empire. First thing's first, thank you Mr. Gideon, for your timely warning about the invasion; thanks to your intelligence, the Novan Stellar Navy remains intact, making it the only fleet in the galaxy at full combat strength.
YONG: Never did I expect to rescue the Novan Navy by action or inaction.
TROY: Nevertheless, you did do it. If all goes well, I suspect a lot of people will thank you for doing so.
YONG: And if all does not go well?
TROY: Well, then, at least you tried. Let's start with something pretty simple. How much does the Terran Hegemony know about the black ship?
YONG: You don't want to ask why I defected?
TROY: Oh, we'll get to that. First, though, I have a lot of other folks breathing down my back, and they really want to know about the black ship. Tell me absolutely everything you know, and don't leave anything out, even stuff we probably both know, just in case you know more than we do about it. And I will interrupt to ask questions.
YONG: The black ship comes from the third planet orbiting the RN-06 star in neutral space. The world itself is habitable, though not hospitable, to humans and Grushan. The planet was under a Grushan Federation quarantine on the advisory of an ancient warning satellite left by an extinct race called the Sheradzon. According to Grushan databases, the planet was a fortification left by the Sheradzons' deceased enemies. Grushan never investigated further, but according to their surveyors, records of advanced technology existed on the surface. The Terran Exoplanetary Research Administration requested permits to investigate, the President and myself agreed that the potential for a technological edge over the Grushan was too great to pass up. A science vessel was commissioned to investigate and arrived in the RN-06 system on June 4 of this year.
TROY: So, you violated a Grushan quarantine for...technology?
YONG: The Federation is the only viable economic and military threat to the Hegemony in existence. Does it not seem logical for the Hegemony to look for any possible edge?
TROY: When has the Federation threatened the Hegemony?
YONG: The threat of the Federation is existential. What would you call a force so powerful as to wipe out everything that you care about in less than a lifetime?
TROY: A lot of things can do that. Force isn't always the best way to overcome them. Also, I really feel I should point out that you started the war, not the Federation.
YONG: I had no part in this war.
TROY: I don't know. I've been working on Earth my whole life, and it seems like there was a lot of kindling even before the coup you told me about or the arrival of the black ship. Some of that was your fault, Mr. Gideon.
YONG: I fail to see how.
TROY: If we had the time, I would take it to give you a quick recap of "the Grushan hate Earth" propaganda that's been coming out of Hegemony media offices since the Novan Revolution. But we don't, so let's talk instead about how the Hegemony got a slow, cumbersome science vessel through the Grushan security net. That thing should have been caught the minute it showed up in that star system, but you're telling me that it eluded detection for nearly a whole month? How does that work?
YONG: I don't know the full details of that operation.
TROY: Bullshit. What do you know?
YONG: There is an organization on several Grushan worlds which in English is known as the Peaceable Advancement Society. You have heard of them, I suppose?
TROY: Oh, I know them pretty well. My brother works sometimes with the Federation governor on Hezheran, and he helps them deal with PAS partisans. They're on the Federation's terrorist watchlist.
YONG: Are you familiar with their ideology?
TROY: They've been pushing for a Grushan Interlink based form of Government. Basically they're you and the President, but with tails.
YONG: The PAS has been operating under the Earth Operations Agency since its inception. We have been supplying them with both weapons and funding. They in turn have distributed that funding and research to several non-violent groups. Again, I haven't been briefed on the full details of the operation, but a source that we code-named TROTSKY was installed with an Interlink modified to conform to Grushan biology. TROTSKY infiltrated the Federation's border intelligence offices and, under Mainframe guidance, implanted a virus into the Grushan monitoring system that gave the PAS full control of what they could observe.
TROY: Go back a bit; you managed to get a Mainframe to control a host 250 light-years away?
YONG: No, the PAS constructed a Mainframe of their own on Hezhar under Hegemony instruction.
TROY: There's an actual Mainframe on Hezhar? Holy shit. The Grushan are going to eat this tape alive. I'm going to need everything you know about that thing in a separate report ASAP. Although we'll probably get to it before we're done here. And this TROTSKY fellow, of course. But getting back to the black ship. You sent a science ship to RN-06 3. When did they find the black ship?
YONG: I don't know completely what they found. They sent weekly reports back to the Terran Interstellar Authority, but they were never complete records. I do remember that they discovered a few abandoned settlements, but no significant technological finds. In our last report, they described a subterranean cavern on the Eastern continent that was emitting odd forms of radiation. I can only imagine that this was where they looked. Perhaps it is also where they found the Zaha-Katchem, waiting like so many dragon's teeth sewn in the earth, and awoke them.
TROY: I don't get that reference.
YONG: The last we heard from the science team was a distress signal sent via radio over warp waves. It was picked up by the TSS Swordfish, which jumped to RN-06 to investigate.
TROY: That's the ship you guys lost, right? You said that it had gone to Yveran.
YONG: We took great effort to send our teams to RN-06 in the first place; it seemed foolish to throw away all that effort.
TROY: Okay, fine. But you lost two ships to keep that secret; I hope it was worth it. Did you at least get any decent information from it? Anything on the Zaha-Katchem species or culture?
YONG: Several skeletons were discovered, but none matched the description of the Zaha-Katchem. Xeno-anthropologists I have spoken to believe that the remains uncovered are from a slave race, possibly Sheradzon war prisoners. There was significant ecological damage; high amounts of greenhouse gasses, industrial waste, and biological contaminants littered the landscape that the scientists landed near. The settlement was small and its inhabitants seem to have been killed by biological or chemical weapons.
TROY: What about their technology? I know you said that the crew didn't find much, but did they at least find... I don't know, an airport or something? You never found out what was in the cave?
YONG: I think we all found out what was in the cave. But no, I don't know anything further about the technology found on the surface if there was any.
TROY: That's disappointing. Do continue with the black ship story then.
YONG: A task force under Admiral Nobuyuki Ito was sent to intercept it in the Alpha Ceti system. We didn't know if it had FTL capabilities, but data transmitted by the Swordfish suggested that it had very fast sublight speed that didn't seem to rely on chemical or superheated argon propulsion. Their sensors also detected large gravitational fluctuations surrounding the ship; our scientists have speculated that that is how their propulsion operates.
TROY: What kind of fluctuations?
YONG: As it was explained to me, in addition to the ship's warp field, there was a significant gravity well near the ship. The Swordfish was partially diverted from its heading by the presence of this field. We noted the same fluctuations when the black ship arrived in Alpha Ceti and later in Sol. We surmised that a species capable of that level of spatial manipulation might be capable of generating its own spatial waves and manage FTL travel without the assistance of a station dedicated to wave generation.
TROY: So, it's been flying around at will while we've been stuck going from system to system with only warp gates? That explains a lot.
YONG: It is rather like a shark that emerges from the depths at different places faster than a ship can track it.
TROY: All right. So Alpha Ceti. How many ships did you send with Admiral Ito?
YONG: Ito had six ships at his disposal, including his flagship, the Alexander Nevsky. He was instructed to destroy the black ship by any means possible if it refused to recognize Terran sovereignty. It didn't, so Ito attempted to destroy it using nuclear warheads. He was unable to successfully contact the target with tactical warheads however. The rest of the fleet proved no match.
TROY: Now, I happen to know that the Alexander Nevsky is currently in orbit of Nova, and presumably Nobuyuki Ito with it. It sounds like he found a way to survive the black ship; how did he do that?
YONG: The black ship didn't finish him. It had destroyed every other ship in Ito's fleet and disabled the Alexander Nevsky, but chose not to destroy it. It sent a brief audio transmission and then cloaked and left.
TROY: Any idea why they did that?
YONG: I have none.
TROY: But surely you asked one of them about all this? Didn't they give an explanation for attacking you and destroying an entire task force?
YONG: Never to me. And the Hegemony kept the battles in Alpha Ceti and Sol secret, so an explanation was never offered to the public. So I don't know. And I was only afforded very limited access to Zahal and his envoys; he was very selective about who he spoke to, and I was not privileged with that access. Even when I chose to seek him out of my own volition, I was kept away by chaotic visions.
TROY: I have so many questions right now. First, didn't you have a diplomatic team on them at all times?
YONG: The President was in charge of managing the diplomatic arrangements surrounding the Zaha-Katchem. I was not briefed on those arrangements, nor was I a part of their coming to be.
TROY: The President? You mean the dead guy?
YONG: I suppose so.
TROY: So, you really mean Shen Wei-Fun, CEO of Ambience Corp.?
YONG: Again, it would seem so.
TROY: And you weren't briefed on any of this? And no one in the entire Terran Hegemony administration thought to ask why their new friends destroyed...how many ships in all?
YONG: Seventeen.
TROY: Seventeen ships? That's more than Nova ever destroyed, even in the war!
YONG: Now do you start to see how the seeds to my defection were planted in the first place?
TROY: Mr. Gideon, if I had been in your position, I might have done the exact same thing. Good lord! How did you guys get so stupid?
YONG: Or so corrupt.
TROY: No shit. Wow. I cannot believe I just heard that. [pause] Well, I guess, moving on though, we still have more black ship debriefing to do. So Ito's ship is left crippled but alive and the black ship heads straight to Earth. How did they know where to go? For that matter, how did they know to go to Alpha Ceti?
YONG: The final transmission of the Swordfish implied that the ship had been boarded; we assume they accessed its database and navigational charts.
TROY: Without having translated the English language?
YONG: If you saw a map of the Earth in a language you didn't recognize, would you be able to find its capital?
TROY: Yes, but pretty much all Earth maps have a little star symbol. Grushan maps don't. And Terran star maps aren't super specific either. There was as good of a chance of them ending up at the frontier post in Wolf 359 as Sol. And there was no reason that they would know about the little star convention either. This whole thing sounds a bit fishy to me.
YONG: Maybe they translated our language before they landed in Peking on the 24th of July.
TROY: Okay, I am getting way too distracted here. Let's go back to Alpha Ceti. You said that Ito fired off nukes at it, but none hit. What happened?
YONG: According to records, when Ito fired, the black ship cloaked and dropped from target lock. Although he fired several tactical warheads, none actually hit the ship. We were hopeful that this meant that the black ship would be vulnerable to nuclear weapons fire, for it would otherwise take it head-on as it did the conventional missiles that we have fired at it. However, when it arrived in Sol, those hopes were dashed.
TROY: Ah, yes, the "military exercises" in Sol. Tell me how that went.
YONG: We gathered the entire fleet in the hopes of stopping the black ship with the full firepower of the Terran Star Fleet. Ito's last transmission suggested that it was on a direct course to Sol, and sensor stations on Alpha Ceti seemed to confirm this. So, the President ordered all forces away from borders and spacedock positions to prepare to defend Sol in the event of an attack. According to our analysts and Mainframe projections, we weren't likely to have success using conventional weapons, but the possibility of nuclear weapons was still open. We formed five task forces to escort the fleet's battlecruisers and battleships, which as you know contain nuclear arsenals. Then we waited. The black ship began its assault in the Kuiper security net and engaged the first of the task forces at Neptune. We engaged, but were again unable to confirm contact with any tactical warheads. It engaged at too close range and any ship that fired would itself be destroyed, along with other large portions of the fleet. When we were able to fire, it cloaked or destroyed the missile at long range. It fought its way through our defenses and finally reached Earth itself. Then it entered geosynchronous orbit and stopped. Then, we fired tactical warheads at it from the fleet and from within Earth's atmosphere. Eighty missiles made contact with the black ship; it sustained no damage.
TROY: Eighty missiles hit? You're absolutely sure that they hit it?
YONG: Even if they did not, a six-hundred-kilometer area was irradiated. The power grid went down completely in large areas of my home country. Nothing should have survived that explosion.
TROY: And you're absolutely sure that it was there when you hit it? It wasn't cloaked or anything?
YONG: It was as visible as any of our ships.
TROY: This cloaking technology. What does the Hegemony know about that?
YONG: Not enough. One moment, it is there, the next, it is as the night itself, gone among the stars.
TROY: But surely you have some idea of how it does it, right? I mean, what's the point of those Mainframe things if you can't figure out how a singly cloaking device works?
YONG: The Mainframe is primarily an analytical device. Its innovative potential is, I think, over advertised.
TROY: Fine. But what about gravitational indicators? It has a warp drive, and a pretty powerful one at that, from what you described earlier. Are you able to track its movement using its gravity? At least that way, you could track its movement.
YONG: I have heard rumors that such a technology is in development; however, it has not yet been completed. The team tasked with the project has encountered several logistical difficulties.
TROY: Such as?
YONG: Their reports to me have not given adequate explanation. They say that their ability to operate has been limited by the Mainframe itself, which has periodically been slow or unresponsive to inquiries. They also say that they have at times received faulty results from the Mainframe, which has never before behaved in such a way.
TROY: So, somebody's tampered with a Mainframe? I thought that was impossible. That was like, the whole point.
YONG: It was supposed to be. However, it has given questionable analysis at other times of late. When the black probe carrying Zahal flew to Peking, it told us that the probe offered "no significant threat," and failed to authorize fighters to engage.
TROY: So, that thing could have been a bomb and your precious Mainframe just ignored it? And everyone else did, too?
YONG: Admiral Ito attempted to shoot it down with one of the cruisers in orbit, but the President stopped him from doing so.
TROY: The dead president? Or was he dead at this point?
YONG: I don't know.
TROY: For the sake of argument, let's say that he was, and Shen Wei-Fun is pulling the strings. It sounds like he's been pulling the strings to directly benefit the Zaha-Katchem, doesn't it?
YONG: If it is Shen. But then, how does war benefit the Zaha-Katchem?
TROY: Maybe we should ask them.
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Hey guys! This was a pretty exposition heavy section, but believe it or not, in the midst of all that recapping we covered some pretty important stuff in this chapter, so thanks so much for reading. Also, a big shoutout to brianshaber for reading and providing tons of helpful comments, which I might not always reply to, but I always read. I also want to thank kasross for more feedback and votes. Finally, please remember to vote and comment if you like what you're reading; not only does it fill my little heart with joy, but it supports this work and other works I put effort into due to Wattpads's nebulous and complex ranking system, and every vote counts. Thanks again for your patience and support! Sincerely, the real jonbrain.