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Well, it's been a busy day. I was finally contacted by Denelo Mori of the Hellfire Legion, and the good news is that they're willing to sell us some scanner technology for the Discovery Project. Mori seemed to know a disturbing amount about it... but was willing. The terms were reasonable too, and I don't doubt that Fenning will be happy with them. During the conversation, the subject of the attack on Freeport 11 was mentioned... apparently one of these "new" nomads called Taurvi was once a human member of the Hellfire Legion, and they've been trying to help him. Without success, unfortunately. The tip was useful to me, though: now I had two ships to search for.
Shortly after that, I returned to Freeport 11 with some additional repair crews. While on approach, I was advised by Freeport Control that one of the "new" nomads had been spotted heading for Omicron Lost. I unloaded my passengers, then contacted Control again.
"Freeport Control, this is the Aedos. Requesting permission to undock."
"Roger, Aedos, came the reply. "Permission granted. What's the big rush? You just got here!"
"I'm headed to Omicron Lost," I said, already backing the Aedos out of the docking bay.
"I advise you change your mind. A dangerous nomad was last seen headed that direction. You aren't planning to eliminate it in that tub, are you?"
"Negative," I said, wincing at his reference to my ship, "I'm going to try to talk to it."
"TALK to it?! Are you out of your skull?"
I switched off comms. I was nervous enough without any "help" from the control tower.
A while later, I made the plunge through the jumphole into Omicron Lost. I'd been here once before, but hadn't strayed far from the hole... the system was quite empty and very dark. This time wasn't much different: nothing at all on scanners except for three suns and a gas giant. Well, I thought, might as well try there. I locked in a course for the planet. As I got closer, I was disappointed. Still nothing on scanners. I shouldn't have been surprised... I was looking for one small fighter in a very big system. Still, I had hoped that it might be near the only detectable planet I could see. I adjusted my course, and set the Aedos to fly around the planet and head back to the jumphole.
And then, suddenly, there it was: a blip on my scope. One nomad fighter, parked on the dark side of the planet. What followed was probably the most surreal and disturbing encounter I've ever had. For brevity's sake, I've attached the message I sent to Leroy Fenning about it as soon as I was back in Delta:
Even after sending the message, I was still a bit shaken up. Something bad was apparently going to happen. Within a couple of minutes, though, I got a message from Fenning that he wanted to see me as soon as possible. A couple of hours later, we met on Freeport 9, and I gave him a full rundown of everything that happened.
"Those terms from the Hellfire Legion will work for us," Fenning said. "It'll be a bit before we can round up the resources, but this is about what I expected."
"Great," I replied. "I'll let them know. By the way, you may want to double-check your security. Mori knew quite a bit about the project, although he waved it off as 'rumors.'"
Leroy grinned. "Don't worry, I know what I'm doing. Suffice it to say that if he didn't know anything about the project, it's doubtful he would be willing to offer help."
It was my turn to grin. "I never would have pegged you as a such a sneaky little...anyway. I've got to get back Freeport 11. It seems more important than ever to get it fully operational again before the next attack."
Leroy turned serious. "So you think there will be another attack?"
"Yeah," I nodded as I stood. "I'm afraid so. Maybe if we're lucky, we'll figure out how to prevent it before it happens, but I'm not counting on that."
A few minutes later, the Aedos was screaming through space towards Omicron Delta.
![[Image: aedos_mini.jpg]](http://students.cs.byu.edu/~sushi/aedos_mini.jpg)