To: The BDM. From: MND Secondary Fleet. Importance: High. Subject: Ghost ships.

[Enkidu]

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Subject Name: Staff Major Finn Haast.

Subject Location: Border Station Lübeck.

Subject Affiliation: MND Secondary Fleet.

Encryption: High.

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Whilst nominally against protocol, Sir, but I have been authorised my report up the chain of command.

I am Oberst F.Haast of the secondary fleet, intelligence liaison command to Federal Police elements working in PCZ Julius in Hamburg; the area of planar space ten clicks cosmic north and south of the throughput routes the Federal Police use to keep traffic greenlit between Lübeck and Hannover - Between the gate and the lanes, I am the eyes and ears of federal enforcement.

Usually I wouldn’t bore the primary fleet on operational details, but we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of throughput results from our listener buoys around the Koeln jumphole. Fluctuations happen all the time - its a known smuggler’s haven - but we’ve been detecting behaviour that doesn’t match normal Unioner traffic. For one, it’s far too confused. We’ve had Unioners broadcasting on open, even civilian channels that they know are going through federal filters. We’ve been tracking locational data, and comm intercepts are high - Unioners may run light on the discipline spectrum, and most of their encryption is last-gen, but their use of field scattering put together with the generally overboard comms insulation is usually enough to keep telemetry location down. There’s been no rise in arrest rates - Unioners intentionally flood their distress bands with multiple comm points simultaneously, so it’s hard to trawl through the neural bounces to get a locational fix in time for an intercept, but what we do know is the contents of their transmissions.


Transmission contents are garbled and inconsistent. I will not bother you with complete transcripts. However, using pattern-matching AI we’ve been able to detect commonalities of theme - the wide majority of the transmissions note compromised COMINT and SIGINT jamming, as if they’ve been subject to invasive E-war intrusions. That in itself wouldn’t be unique - there has been a rise in BHG and unrelated third-party reliance on indirect data collection techniques, but as far as we can gather (Bounty Hunters hardly are a source of reliable testimony), no hunter vessels operating in the area have reported anything out of the ordinary.


This period of anomalous broadcasting has been in transmission for a period of two weeks, before a, abrupt, return to conventional comms traffic. Union cells have started to lock down on reckless broadcasting. They have not been fast enough to prevent our analysts from parsing sufficient information to glean the subject of their distress - and it’s far from my scope, Sir.

At first we thought the Unioners were playing with us, but after several arrests we were able to verify that these are indeed Unioner agents sending the open hails - as far as we can gather, the Union has been internally stable for the past three months, indicating a separate motivation to a purge. I would suggest that suddenness of the Union’s response to the rogue transmitters implies a cover-up of some kind within the Union itself, far more critical to the Union than the few dozen or so pilots we have been able to round up in the last several weeks.

Commanders, this testimony is going to sound… bizarre. The Union vessels have been transmitting not locational, with any fiscal motive, or even conversationally - they’ve been sending each other sensor patterns of what appears to be utterly empty space, save occasional abnormalities. Even local background radiation has been completely scrubbed.

This is odd, but not Prime Office odd. What makes the transmission of tactical portent, is the audio file I had enclosed below.

“…Adjust, zero one five by zero seven five relative… Radar is covered in ghosts.. Sys-Nav is screaming like a kettle… losing sensor tracks… <Unrecoverable>

…What the hell is that - the blade… <garbled>?”

We recovered this file from the black box of an unlucky Unioner pilot we detained, after being unable to set the demolition charges on his fighter. Upon questioning he gladly spilled everything he knew in exchange for sentence communion; apart from acting dumb about his operations base, the Unioner doesn’t appear to have anything lucid to explain the phenomena that fried his sensor grid in Koeln. He claims the incident took place amidst a dense particle cloud, but cloud reads on the vessel’s nav data - or any evidence that his vessel was in any solar orbit resembling the Koeln system at all. Furthermore, rather than reveal who was jamming him, he gave a long, winding testimony about Germanic Neopaganism and the resurrected ghosts of spaced pilots - draug - before buttoning it entirely. Intensive neurological screening infers that the man was, bizarrely, speaking what he believed to be the truth.

One slightly irradiated Unioner’s mental health issues is the subject of a doctor, not the intelligence apparatus. However, we recovered no less than seventeen Unioners who given more or less the same testimony over the period of the rogue transmissions - and whilst their own black boxes are inaccessible from combat destruction, their statements match. To frame the subject further, all of the recovered Unioner professed to be atheistic, agnostic, or Lutheran Christians.


Whilst Germanic neopaganism has been embraced entirely by the Red Hessians, Unioners exhibit more or less the same patterns of belief endemic to north Rheinland; Hamburg, Berlin and Munich, if with a slightly more christian bent. Considering the Union’s present anger over what they consider to be the Hessian’s betrayal, it is extremely irregular to hear these statements from a Unioner’s mouth.

We can assume that the pilots are indeed telling the truth, and they saw something within the Koeln system that they could not equate to anything physical or rational - that only made sense within the scope of folklore, and was capable of causing them sufficient distress to the point of broadcasting unfiltered locational data in an mechanically functional spacecraft in police patrolled areas.

There are several scenarios that could fit. The first, and most dominant one, is a massive, overwhelming cyber attack on the fighter’s neural core, completely wiping the vessel’s black box and bombarding the pilot with overwhelming, false visual/audio substitutes. The second is that that the Unioners truly did see something paranormal out there. The third is a combination of the two.

This is highly concerning, as would be the attributes of any vessel, installation or alien entity that would be capable of such a thorough E-assault of multiple simultaneous unlinked vessels. I strongly advise the primary fleet attempts to investigate this matter, if there is any risk our own pilots may return to port telling tall-tales of “ghosts” amidst the cosmos.


Thank you for your time, Sirs.

Major Haast, out.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)

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[Geoffacake]

Direktor Enfield

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Büro der Marineintelligenz
Encrypted Video Transmission

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.......● RECIPIENTS:.........Finn Haast
.......● SENDER:-..............Geoffrey Enfield
.......● LOCATION:´..........New Berlin
.......● PRIORITY:..............█ █ █ █ █
.......● SUBJECT:..............Re: Ghost ships (?)

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To: Staff Major Finn Haast


Right, what I like is the concept of strange mysterious technology. What I love is when people start crapping themselves about it and blame some kind of "higher being" for screwing up their equipment. One big mistake they made was using the open channels to direct their communication traffic to other sources to cry "wolf" about some kind of ghost ship sighting.

I personally hate filtering through regular data traffic to find out what the Unioners have sent, but for them to blatantly send out one that has their markings all over it does spell out "Help me, something big is happening." What seems to have happened is something along the lines of their Communication Intelligence and Signal intelligence seems to be some form of Obvious jamming. Normally they'd send out a system wide broadcast and it wouldn't be picked up. But it seems that the jammers were only targeting a specific area and ships from receiving signals, so it seems to be a more precise attack compared to a area-wide jamming. What may of been compromised is their actual ship systems, this doesn't seem like an automated system because if they were able to retrieve a message through their data packets, it seems that someone was blocking their own receivers. Messages come out screaming "Ghost ship" but unfortunately they can't hear their home base; This is what probably attacked their Satellite navigation systems.

As you described, their encryption and security systems are legacy. So if it comes to them not knowing the more advanced systems that we have at our disposal, we might be in luck in setting up a honey-pot to track their methods. I still doubt its a ghost ship Major, I don't believe in superstition. There is always a scientific explanation to everything.

We have something in the works that might be able to investigate, but it is no way near ready. I'd send out a team but like you said, the reason people are calling out "Ghost" is because they have no clue about whats hitting them. Our current equipment is still using military standard, we need time to prepare for such a risk. If there's any more activity, please keep in contact.

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From,

Direktor Geoff Enfield
Büro der Marineintelligenz, Oberkommando

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Message End

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[Enkidu]

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Subject Name: Staff Major Finn Haast.

Subject Location: Border Station Lübeck.

Subject Affiliation: MND Secondary Fleet.

Encryption: High.

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Good news, commander; we've sited the anomaly.

Commander, since our last contact there has been significant progress.

The Federal Police often put signal receivers on navigation buoys to photograph traffic passing through the area. They are activated by magnetometer, not by signal traffic.

Nav Buoys placed in unusual locations are frequently destroyed by pirates and other lowlifes - it’s an old trick. They tend to distrust any unusual satellites in their territory.

One Buoy placed on a drift trajectory towards the Norddrauwolke remained reporting for an unusually long time, however. Abnormal magnetic fluctuations caused it to roll LIDAR for a solid seventy six hours before shutdown. Nothing out of the ordinary was detected, except for one frame:



This is obviously a manufactured structure. It appears to be of impressive size and foreign design. We are attempting to search for data-matches.

Oddly, for an entity broadcasting so much E-chaff, it showed no signs of aggression towards the buoy, or perhaps carries no weapons at all. The buoy is still here, after all.

Despite a silhouette and a rough magnetic profile, we have no information as to its purpose, origin, or composition. What we do know is that it is very, very large.

Unfortunately, the location data was scrubbed from the buoy. Corruption is consistent with invasive hacking, likely by the same object the drone photographed. It appears the vessel exhibits only limited onboard intelligence and was not able to identify its own silhouette, or it is likely the photographs would have been scrubbed, too.


Obviously, this is above my paygrade. Handing your way.

Major Haast, out.

[Geoffacake]

Direktor Enfield

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Büro der Marineintelligenz
Encrypted Video Transmission

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.......● RECIPIENTS:.........Finn Haast
.......● SENDER:-..............Geoffrey Enfield
.......● LOCATION:´..........New Berlin
.......● PRIORITY:..............█ █ █ █ █
.......● SUBJECT:..............Re: Ghost ships (?)

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To: Staff Major Finn Haast


That has to be one of the largest mobile structures I've seen.

This is a problem, but I'm also willing to try and turn it into the advantage without causing some kind of backfire that can possibly result in our asses getting counter-attacked by either direct fire weapons or a cyber-attack. Obviously that thing is going to try and breach our systems but I've pushing for our special equipment to be made temporarily available for this threat, its a gamble that I'm willing to risk.

The buoys are generally tracked via system grid references that sync with one another to ensure that they're maintained in a constant position from each other in the case of being knocked off course along with time logs of those positions to every connected nav-buoy, I'll need those locations. I'm requesting that your available forces try and quarantine its last known area and current suspected area of operations until we get there, I don't want that thing slipping away immediately and maybe we can come to some sort of... "Agreement." I'm also sending in a heavy attack division in the case that this thing is hostile.

Good luck.

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From,

Direktor Geoff Enfield
Büro der Marineintelligenz, Oberkommando

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Message End

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[Enkidu]

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Subject Name: Staff Major Finn Haast.

Subject Location: Border Station Lübeck.

Subject Affiliation: MND Secondary Fleet.

Encryption: High.

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I apologise for the delay in communication, Sir. I saw no fitting need to make report until there was an opportunity to act. Unioner activity in the region have thinned in the days following the tragedy at Alster - the north field has thinned of Unioner elements crossing the Virlande passage. This gives us an opening.

We discovered a pattern in the vessel’s movements, commander, that we believe we can exploit. It has been proceeding towards locations of high inherent background scatter, masking its sensor signature in lieu of a cloaking device, augmenting its own jamming. Beyond vessel avoidance, it exhibited no suspect activity which would imply intelligent control - or any form of crew at all. We’ve put the theory to task by sending salvos of jury-rigged ionic amplifier satellites towards the ship’s approximate position, in an attempt to force her to change course - the same satellites we use to forwarn civilian traffic of incoming ionic storms. Photographic evidence from the satellites, taken in varying field locations infer our theory to be effective, Sir. We believe the anomaly will emerge from the Norddrauwolke in any period within the coming hours, to the coming days, beyond which our limited ability to direct her travel through manipulating local interference levels will be ameliorated by the loss of the nebulae.



We cannot factor what we are not aware of, however, we believe the vessel is headed for co-ordinates within the following grid, far from Koeln’s charted regions. I will accompany a boarding team towards the preset regions. Heavy interference in the zone will put us beyond the range of neural buoys; we will require a recovery team to return message contact.

Direktor, if you help me recover my operations, I will sign for her transfer to Primary Fleet custody. I do not trust anyone else’s authorisation on this matter, nor does this fit into the mandate of the Federal Police Force.

I am an old man, Direktor. I will brass an unremarkable career.

Major Haast, out.