January 15 2052 Office of the President Presidential Palace of the United Planet of Earth Lisbon Portugal Director Brian Kinney of the Department of Planetary Security has been summoned to meet with President Vasily Ostrov of the United Planet of Earth. While Kinney is 80 and the President is in his 60s the difference in their ages isn’t noticeable. “Director Kinney I’ve called you here to find out how the war for revenge is going. Your department is very tight lipped. They won’t tell me anything without your approval. Somehow I don’t think that is how it was intended to be when the Department of Planetary Security was set up, all those years ago. As President of Earth I expect to be told the answer to questions I ask; not that I have to ask the Director of the Agency in question for those answers.” “I’m sorry sir but you have to know that we’ve been working on this situation for over 45 years and some of my staff are overly protective of the Department’s information. I’ll make sure that they understand that you have full access to our data. But it’s important that this information remain confidential. The situation isn’t quite what we’ve been telling the public. We’ll need time to change the message we’re giving the public.” “What do you mean by that Director Kinney? Are we losing the war?” “No Mr. President, we aren’t losing the war but we aren’t winning it either.” “What does that mean?” “The problem is that we can’t bring the bastards to battle. Since that first contact with the ships of the Legion we haven’t been able to engage any of their ships. Whether they’re military ships or civilian they simply jump to N-space before we can get close enough to use our weapons. I guess we expected space warfare to be like the science fiction shows; one side wants to fight so the other side fights too even if it doesn‘t make sense for them to fight. We’ve come across orbital facilities in several stellar systems, but all of them have obviously been civilian so we haven‘t attacked them. We know where they are and can go back and destroy them; but I don‘t want to be the first to attack civilian targets. That’s the justification of Operation Revenge, that the Legion authorized an attack on Earth‘s civilian population so we don‘t want to attack civilian targets unless we have to.” “Can’t you bring them to battle in N-space?” “You can’t count on anything happening the way you expect in N-space. Unless an object is big enough to have its own N-space drive there is no predicting what will happen to it. A missile might go where it is supposed to go then just stop and sit there. That missile might go in the complete opposite direction of where it was aimed, or it might make a 180 turn and hit the ship that fired it. The only way you could fight in N-space would be to ram the other ship. We aren’t that desperate yet and some of the experts aren’t really sure that ramming would work either. Plus it’s even harder to find other ships in N-space than it is to catch ships in normal space. That first battle was so lucky in so many ways that we should’ve realized that it wasn‘t going to be as easy to hurt the Legion as we thought.” “What’re your plans Director Kinney?” “We’ll continue to send squadrons out to learn as much as we can and to harass them. Every time some of our ships jump into an Empire system we disrupt their shipping; because they’re afraid we’ll be able to destroy them and they jump into N-space or return to the planet before they planned to. Eventually we’ll be lucky and jump into a system close enough to something and will be able to capture a prisoner. With a prisoner we can learn their languages and then open up a dialogue with them. I’m still hoping that they’ll send Major Peterson, or one of the Stolen, back to us so that they can start negotiations. Until we can talk all we can do is carry on with what we’ve been doing and hope for some luck. We’ve located over 100 of their planets and the Colonization Department is researching over a dozen uninhabited planets for our future colonization needs. We’ve noticed a change in the behavior of some of their larger warships though.” “Well don’t keep me in suspense Director.” “After the first contact with them, when we destroyed the convoy, every ship we’ve gotten anywhere close to has jumped to N-space but now some of these larger ships will make an attack vector like they plan on fighting then at the last possible second they’ll jump to N-space. Our military experts feel that this is just a game of chicken, that they’re setting us up for the point when they actually have an armed ship in place. Our ships will be so used to them jumping that when one doesn’t they’ll not react in time and the Empire ship will be able to get off a salvo first. All of our officers have been informed of this but It’s human nature to let up and so I expect that eventually we’ll lose a ship or two to this ruse. I suppose it says something that the ships of the Empire weren‘t armed, it just emphasizes that they haven‘t had to fight in space for a very long time.” “Thank you Director Kinney, keep me informed of any further developments.” “Yes Mr. President I’ll do that.” “Director Kinney I’m sorry to interrupt but an important message just came from the Command Center.” “What’s the message Captain Sheridan?” “A Legion ship just jumped into Jupiter orbit.” “Just one, what’s it doing?” “It’s just sitting there, Director Kinney. Command Center is now reporting that the ship is sending Major Peterson’s identification sequence.” A look of joy covers the face of the Director, the President smiles knowing why the other man is happy. TBC