>>5922150“So either it was a front for the innies the whole time, or they snapped it up at a scrapping auction and put her back together. What can we get from it’s nav logs?” You grumbled. Unfortunately, such a story was all too familiar. It’d happened with basically every bit of former CMA equipment that the UNSC had distributed to the outer colony defense forces to try and ward off the covenant early in the war. And all it had accomplished was handing equipment over to the innies.
“Multiple trips between Arcadia and locations in the outer colonies that are behind the lines. The vessel arrived at Arcadia a few hours before the glassing, and jumped out approximately five minutes after the Covenant fleet arrived. After following a series of random cole-protocol compliant jumps, they jumped here and made their way here. They landed to discharge their drive, and attempted to cycle up to full power a few days later. The logs end then.” Diana replied, charting out the vessel’s course. Someone at ONI would be interested in those charts, but you couldn’t see any locations that you could reach without taking a massive chunk out of your limited fuel reserves.
“Do we have any visual data from around the time of her loss? Cameras, other stuff like that?” Dyad asked next, focusing more on the ship’s end rather than it’s origins.
“Child’s play. Coming on screen now.” Diana answered, before turning her avatar to face the screen. You and Dyad did the same just in time to watch the last few seconds of the corvette’s life. The corvette sat inert on the surface, its cameras pointed up into the void. A few seconds later, a familiar blue dot appeared in the sky for a couple of seconds. Just long enough for the cameras to zoom in, and to spot the corvette’s killer. A single, manta-ray-like vessel, with four fin-like antennas mounted beneath its bulbous bow. It dropped out of slipspace, and within seconds detected and targeted the Mako.
That ship was a Covenant cruiser, its flanks glowing hot with super-heated plasma just before it fired.
>Pack up and get moving. If that thing is still around, or if it comes back, you’re a sitting duck.>Keep discharging the drive. The operative word is “IF” it’s still around, even if you missed it, the rest of your wolf pack probably hadn’t.>Other (write in)