“That being, sir?” an analyst asked.

“An invasion.” Marcum tossed the pages he’d been nervously rolling up back onto the table. “Call your boss, Pike. We need to be on top of this as fast as we can.”

“Yes, sir.” Pike nodded and went to one of the secure com terminals.

****

Pike didn’t see any further use in antagonizing Admiral Marcum. Everything he’d said about the man to his face still held true, but he was still the CENTCOM Chief of Staff and the highest ranking military officer in the Federation. That alone accorded him a certain amount of respect and they would all need to work together now that the mission had changed from a simple routing out of an occupying force to protecting Fed planets along the Ushin/Darshik frontier.

There was also the fact that Pike himself had known about the plan to use Starfleet to expand the Federation’s territory by assisting the Ushin militarily. Granted it was ill-gotten knowledge and he’d had nobody to report it to as the Federation’s bureaucracy got its feet under it, but that did nothing to assuage the guilt he felt as Celesta’s ship was currently unaccounted for and had last been spotted deep in a system completely blanketed by the enemy.

It wasn’t his place to question what the elected leadership did, or didn’t do, when it came to the application of force to secure a political goal, and he had to admit that at the time it seemed like a decent trade-off. The Fleet flies in, kicks a weak holding force out of two systems, humanity gets their two dozen or so planets, and there’s even the feel-good story of freeing new allies from evil invaders. It was the sort of stark morality tale that played well in the press and to the public, the vast majority who had never even been to orbit or seen a starship in person. To them it was always something happening so very far away, but Pike knew how meaningless the distances were from watching the Phage crawl across the Frontier, wiping out planets at will.

Everyone involved in the Ushin deal should have seen clearly they were being manipulated. Events had happened too quickly and too conveniently, hindsight being what it is, and now it seemed they might be inextricably mired in a situation they were not prepared for. That excuse held water when the Phage had appeared out of nowhere and begun razing planets, but to have it happen this soon afterwards didn’t give Pike a lot of hope for the species.

“What the hell’s going on?” The voice almost startled Pike as he rounded the corner heading for the docking-arm complex.

“What do you mean?” he asked innocently.

“We’re getting back-channel rumors that the taskforce we just deployed was wiped out,” Amiri Essa whispered. “What the—”