It was a cowed and sweaty Lieutenant who carried the report with unsteady steps. The old phrase 'Don't shoot the messenger' came to his mind most readily, words he mentally repeated over and over, like a mantra. Not only was the news he carried terrible, but it placed much of the Navy's covert operations in the Alaska system at risk.
Aleutian Shipyards was gone. Vanished, without a trace. Not only was ' is ' it a top-secret facility, it was the test-bed for the new Osiris-class Dreadnought. And it was gone. Not only was it gone, it was no longer mother-f'n there, as in it physically had moved from one place to another. No sign of debris at the old location. And that wasn't the worst of it. Oh no, the blueprints? Gone like fat-kid candy the day after Halloween.
It didn't take long for him to get to the Admiral's office. Clearing himself with the desk secretary, he entered the main room with what could best be described as trepidation. The Admiral, a man in his fifties with a clean-cut shave and eyes that bore with an intensity reserved for mining lasers looked as if he anticipated grim news. Lieutenant Curtis Elwood didn't disappoint. Gently laying the papers on the desk as if they were something holy, in this the temple, he backed away on soft feet as the Admiral scanned them.
May 11, 797 AS
Personal Log: Lieutenant Curtis Elwood
Entering the fourth month of my 'assignment', if you could call it that. I talked to the techies a great deal about what the Osiris was like, and well... let's just say I know it like the back of my hand. At least as well as I can without ever having seen the blueprints, something they seem mysteriously unable to reproduce. Something isn't right.
We still don't know who stole it, let alone who made off with the entire f***ing shipyard. Or how. It's the how that kills me. It'd almost have to be a portable jump hole generator, but to control something so spontaneous... I don't know, it just seems impossible. I'm not scientist, but I know the difference between reality and science fiction...
...In all this time the Admiral hasn't changed his mind. He seems livid still, I'm surprised he hasn't gotten ulcers. Hell, maybe he has. I know I almost have...
...Sometimes I feel like something is watching me out here in Alaska, as if they're right behind me. But whenever I turn around, there's nothing there...
September 30, 797 AS
Personal Log: Lieutenant Curtis Elwood
Well, they finally relented. I have been over every square centimeter of the Alaska system three times almost, no sign of anything. I even was the first human to chart Planet Wrangell, and the jump hole that was near it. I went through, but it was as boring as Alaska so I returned without doing much poking around.
Anyways, the Admiral finally reassigned me. Only now, I’m apparently some expert on Alaska so I’m still in here. How the hell am I supposed to see any action or get promoted here, on the ass-end of Sirius?
August 23, 798 AS
Personal Log: Lieutenant Commander Curtis Elwood
Well. I finally got promoted. What for?
I found the f***ing Osiris. Only, I was the only person to see it. It was strange. The IFF read “The Order” and the weapons configuration wasn’t the standard Liberty affair. When I hailed it some guy named Orillion answered. It was so weird. He seemed gruff, almost hostile.
As if the Navy, or Liberty itself, was something that had betrayed him. At first I was excited to have finally found what I had searching for, but then something was wrong. It didn’t add up. What the deuce was the
Order? What the hell is that?
Then the weapon systems powered up, and I beat feet back to base. I didn’t wanna risk losing my life needlessly against a Dreadnought, especially not one as advanced as the Osiris supposedly was. Long story short, I gave my briefing (calling it a “tactical retreat”) and was immediately promoted. Then I was informed that the Order was some sort of terrorist group.
Things were finally beginning to calm down after the whole alien debacle. Curtis Elwood received several medals for engagements with the creatures, and another promotion. It was a wonder that he advanced at all given the rage of the one Admiral, even though the incident with Aleutian Shipyards had been over five-and-a-half years ago. Only, something was wrong.
The Osiris that the Order had deployed as their flagship wasn’t the original. In-depth scans garnered by the LSF from unnamed sources had been poured over by several specialists, all to the conclusion that there was no way the Osiris being covertly deployed in defiance of both the Nomads and the Liberty Navy was the one that had been under construction in Aleutian Shipyards. The power signatures didn’t even vaguely match. Some speculated that the core had been constructed by the Corsairs, others the Zoners – no one could say for certain.
One thing was speculated, however: the disappearance of Aleutian Shipyards had not been perpetrated by the Order. A new investigation was launched, headed by now- Captain Curtis Elwood.
July 21, 804 AS
Personal Log: Commander Curtis Elwood
For the second time the search for Aleutian was abandoned. We broadened the search to covert missions into Omicron Minor, what we now know as the doorway to the Edge Worlds and perhaps the home of the Order. We lost too many patrols the farther out we went, however, and soon we found ourselves confined to
Alaska once again.
It hurt that I failed a second time on such a large endeavor, but this time my superiors understood completely that it had been a hopeless task to begin with. All I can say is that this will all make a brilliant ghost story one day. The haunted shipyard that forever roams the galaxy, looking for careers to devour...
It was a shocking day when a routine Navy patrol in Alaska picked up an unknown structure on long-range scanners. More than shocking. Matter of fact, Curtis Elwood was pissed as hell. He had swept the system dozens of times and had never found it. Never. And some random pilots stumble across it in the system he had swept dozens of times? Regardless.
The mystery had managed to be solved relatively quickly, as far as investigations go. A month after Aleutian Shipyards was rediscovered, it was clear that more than the construction of the Osiris had been going on. Some sort of research above Curtis' security clearance had been taking place, which had resulted in... something. The higher-ups were aware, just he wasn't.
Without blueprints and only with scans of the Order's version of the Osiris (which had been changed significantly to account for different abundances in resources) and pipedreams of various techies, the continuation of the Osiris project was rather slow. However, eventually, it was completed. And guess who got command? The man who had been there from the beginning, now-Captain Curtis Elwood.
![[Image: 5d1144bd1.png]](http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k13/gurjiv/5d1144bd1.png)