“We received word from the taskforce. It was a point-to-point com drone from the New York. Admiral Wilton personally did the emergency brief,” Pike said, handing Marcum a hardcopy sheet of the summary. He read through the two-paged brief twice, his pallor matching that of Pike’s as he did so. It was an utter disaster, and not the type that came from bad decisions in the field or poor operational planning … the type that put people in prison for a long, long time. He couldn’t even think about what consequences he might face as he read through the list of ships still missing.

“Fuck me,” he said, swallowing hard. “Okay, Pike … give me a complete brief, everything you have. Then we have to go back down to the surface. The President will need to be informed of this as soon as possible.”

“Yes, sir,” Pike nodded and began bringing up information on the briefing room’s large wall monitors. The agent did most of the talking, acting as an aggregator while funneling in information from the other intelligence specialists in the room as needed. The picture he painted was bleak. Wilton’s taskforce flew right into what was apparently a very elaborate trap by the Darshik and, to make things just a bit worse, the admiral clearly suspected that the Ushin were directly responsible. Marcum hoped there were just issues with the translation in that regard, but he couldn’t deny that if the Darshik set a specific trap for the Terran taskforce someone had to tell them they were coming.

“So far that’s all we know,” Pike said, wrapping up his report. “The information from Wilton wasn’t as inclusive as it could have been because the New York was covering the withdrawal of the Forth Fleet destroyers and she was taking fire. The Seventh Fleet destroyer, Atlas, is likely lost. The Icarus was deep down in the system and Senior Captain Wright reported that she was going to try and draw the enemy further down to allow the New York and the destroyer Hyperion to hit the jump point.

“Admiral Wilton stuck to the plan with the opening salvos coming from his heavy-missile cruisers, but then he had the foresight to send them back through the Juwel jump point once they’d spent their payload. This actually could have been much worse given the fact you cut back the size of the taskforce being deployed and Admiral Wilton was able to save the bulk of his fleet.”

“Saving most of the taskforce was indeed a stroke of luck thanks to Wilton’s competent command.” Marcum nodded slowly. “But this wasn’t just a trap to destroy a bunch of Terran ships for the sake of it; they were trying to reduce our forces significantly in one decisive action before we could even figure out what the hell was going on. This sort of gambit can only be followed by one thing.”