Sender: Texas Separatists
To: Liberty Navy
Encryption: HIGH
Greetings Liberty Navy before few hours our pilots were on patrol in New Hampshire they caught 2 gunboat captains and 1 navy pilot they delivered them to Texas . After that we gave them food and sent them in to Prisoner Cell we will free them but for a small fee 14 000 000 for every GB captain and 4 000 000 for the navy pilot . If you don't send the money in the next 2 days we won't guarantee their safety .
Proof:
The deadline is approaching the captives have food and water but if you don't say where to meet to release the captives for the set amount of SC we won't guarantee their safety.
Sender: Texas Separatists
To: Liberty Navy
Encryption: HIGH
Greetings Liberty Navy the deadline ended you had 2 days to pay for the captives , we didn't received any amount of SC for them so we were forced to throw in outer space one of the pilots and every 5 hours we will throw one pilot to sure death in outer space.Better send the SC .
Proof:
"Bastard's scrambled the location, ma'am. I've had sigs looking over it for the past couple of days." Lieutenant Yann Erwan was not a large man. Originally of Pittsburgh stock, he tended more toward the slim, wiry build that had been favoured by the original spacers, long before rudimentary things like weight had ceased to matter in the race for the stars, and no amount of military training seemed to have made the slightest change to his physique. Hartman suspected that if you starved him for two weeks he'd look no different then if he'd just returned from Christmas leave. Right now, he looked ready to reach down the video feed before him and strangle its sender.
"Can you track it?" Hartman asked. Glenbrook didn't have the facilities of a dedicated electronic warfare ship, but the Revere-class auxiliary and one-time refuelling station had been outfitted to command a squadron of transports, and carried more than its fair share of communications equipment. Erwan snorted.
"Depends. Can you wait four months?" Erwan slapped his display, as though he could beat the answer out of the ship's delicate electronics. "They've just gone and pulled the location data from the transmission. That's not a problem, I can trace a source from the where the buoys picked up the signal, but if they've got any sense at all they'll have moved on long before they shoot the comm off. I can tell you that they're in Texas, but-" Erwan waved at the transmission header, boldly declaring the sender as the 'Texas Separatists,' the newest band of nutcases to decide that the Republic was the cause of all their earthly woes. Hartman didn't mind that, specifically. Whining kept the wheels of democracy moving; free speech and all the similar patriotic rubbish that got people back home wearing flag-print clothing and drunkenly singing the national anthem. It was when they got to taking that frustration out on her soldiers that she started minding.
"I think I figured that part out." Hartman glanced at three pulsing blips on Erwan's screen that represented sender locations, traced back from the time-delay between the various communications buoys that had flagged the messages. "Any word from the search teams?"
"Nothing that you'll want to hear, ma'am." Erwan ran a hand through grease-slicked hair. Under ordinary circumstances, Hartman would have ordered him to get it cut. Then again, under ordinary circumstances sigs watches changed every four hours. Erwan hadn't left his post in twelve, by her count. None of them had. Today was an exception to a few of the standard rules. "Cooper and Fuld's flights haven't got anything but vacuum for company at the first two locations, and Lear's boys are still on the way out to the third."
"How long until they get there?" Hartman asked. Erwan glanced at a row of blinking timers on his display. Two of the three had already hit zero. Finding anything with physical searches was a long shot - a needle in a haystack measured in astronomical units, on the off chance that the signal hadn't been bounced off an unregistered relay before the Navy's buoys received it. They were the sort of odds that made a million-to-one chance look like good betting odds. But it was action, and that was the important thing. You could kid yourself that you were making a difference, that you were giving those lost officers a shot at coming home, as long as you were doing something.
"Four hours, twenty three minutes and-." He squinted at the screen."Twelve seconds, give or take. If they time the burn from Houston right. I haven't seen our fighters doing glide and coast in a while. That your idea, ma'am?"
"Not mine, no." It had been Carter's. For all that the Free Captain had been a paranoid control freak, he'd known how to keep a ship under the radar. Hartman didn't doubt that he'd have pulled out one of his smug grins at the thought of a Navy patrol using his ancient, antiquated techniques. Still, for all the glacial slowness of orbital mechanics Hartman had to admit that they had their uses. A ship on an orbital drift might take all day to get where it was going, but without the glow of it's reactor it would look like any other dead piece of metal on the scanners when it got there. "Do have IDs on our missing flyers?"
"A few options. Pinesdale - old Defiant-class boat - sent out a mayday a day or so before these nutjobs started their transmissions." Erwan swiped a finger and scrolled down a few lines. "Mojave responded at... 1427, reported contact at 1500 and, that's it. That's the last we've got from those boats."
"No damage reports?"
"Negative. Zilch. Could be the field, it eats transmissions like a -" Erwan neatly fielded the glare that Hartman shot him, and decided against running with it. "Interferes with transmissions, ma'am. They probably sent them out, we just didn't get them."
"Patrols aren't cleared for the field. Did they send any details on their heading?" Hartman already knew the answer, but some questions had to be asked.
"Not a sound."
Hartman nodded. "'Reckon they got wind of that contact and charged right on in."
"Looks that way." Erwan lifted a list from his desk. "I've got manifests on Pinesdale and Mojave. Looks like they got Lieutenant Commander Har-"
"I don't need their names, Lieutenant." Heaven knew she didn't need more names waiting for her when she closed her eyes at night.
"Er." Erwan paused, looked at her as though she had taken leave of her senses. It was a look Hartman had seen before - faint distaste under a mask of professionalism. Does my philosophy disgust you, Lieutenant? You left people in the fires of hell long enough and they emerged either as demons or the damned. Hartman still wasn't sure which she'd come out as. After a long moment, Erwan continued. "Looks as though they've got the two boat commanders and a rating - not sure who yet. That leaves eight unaccounted for, counting the astrographer on Mojave."
"Eight MIA." Hartman tapped at her thigh, half-counting the bridge crew on Glenbrook. Seven. "Have you sent word to their home squadrons?"
"I've let Pinesdale's command down on Houston know. Mojave was an independent command - astrography doesn't have many ships these days." Erwan's tone dropped a little. "Do you want me to advise the homeworlds, ma'am?"
Ah. Homeworlds. City comforts and the neatly uniformed angels of death climbing apartment blocks with news of a lost son, or a fallen daughter. It was a bastard of a job, no matter how you dressed it up, and one Hartman would choose line duty over without a moment's hesitation. "No, Lieutenant. Hold off for now."
"No disrespect intended, ma'am, but shouldn't they know?"
"Not until we've got something to tell them. Right now it'll just drag the media in things, have the humanitarians badgering us to negotiate."
"And what's so wrong with that?" Erwan hazarded, twelve hours of pent-up frustration creeping into his voice. "There's three people out there. Brothers in damn arms, and we won't talk to get them out? No-one left behind? What happened to that, what sort of rubbish is that?"
"Lieutenant." Hartman cut in, voice colder then the void waiting beyond Glenbrook's plating. "It's been a long shift. I suggest you go and grab five before you say something you have cause to regret."
"And what about them, ma'am? What about our people?"
"They signed on the dotted line. Same as you, same as me. They knew what they were getting in to."No they didn't. No-one signed up expecting to die. Hartman stowed that line of thought. Negotiations now meant teaching the next band of would-be revolutionaries that threats worked, encouraging it. And that, that, was something she could not have on her conscience. "No negotiations. Not with these people. Let them scream whatever they like into the black, but don't you give them the satisfaction of answering it. They'll have our answer at the point of a warhead soon enough.
Take five, Lieutenant. We'll let you know if we find anything in the meantime."
Sender: Texas Separatists
To: Liberty Navy
Encryption: HIGH
I'ts not my problem that you didn't paid for the captives, we set the deadline but we didn't received any SC for your pilots . If thats declaration for war okay but remember TEXAS will be free! And you won't stop us, your corrupt government and your girlish pilots better teach them to run cuz that will be the only thing they could do ! As our flags says .
ENCRYPTION: HIGH SENDER ID: Maverick Trevors, VADM, 56th Division, Texas Armada (4th fleet) LOCATION: Battleship Mississippi, Texas system.
To whoever considering themselves to be the almighty "Texas Separatists",
Lemme tell you something. The Texas Armada has never dealt and never will, with some crazy insane terrorists, considering themselves revolutionaries of the month and acting like a big fish in a small pound.
We take care of our men. These soldiers, have now received full honors posthumously. But, I can assure you that you will be the ones to pay the price for their lives.
I will personally make sure that the whole division will be notified that you are now a priority target, and you will regret the day you thought it was quite a good idea to poke the sleeping bear. You will regret quite some things. Regret being separatists. Regret coming to Texas. And you will most definitely regret when the Navy will blow up your raggy-arse revolution back to wherever the hell it came from.